


as if you'd just woke up

by dankomanuel (somethingradiates)



Series: right in the doorway [1]
Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Polygrumps, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2018-12-30 01:24:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12097647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingradiates/pseuds/dankomanuel
Summary: “What are you thinking about,” Arin says to her that night, runs his fingertips over the back of her bare shoulder.Suzy does not saytag-teaming our best friend.“You know,” she says instead.  “Stuff.  Things.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a thing that's happening. Updates should be weekly (hopefully on Tuesdays). You can find me on [Tumblr](http://plantgrapes.tumblr.com) if that's a thing you're interested in.

The whole thing is Arin’s idea. 

Suzy feels like a lot of things in her life can be pinned back to that - _Arin’s Idea_ , capital A, capital I, proper nouns. Of course, the majority of his ideas have good outcomes, even if the beginning and middle are a little iffy, so when he tells her that he has a _great idea_ , she folds down the corner of the page she’s on and listens. Arin’s _great ideas_ usually get brought up at the office, and usually get forgotten about by the time he’s home, so for him to stick with one past dinner means that it’s at least somewhat serious. 

“Dan’s never worn makeup before,” her husband tells her, and the tone of his voice indicates that she should be surprised about that, which - she kind of is, a little, because Dan seems like he could be pretty easily roped into a high school stage production. “Like, real makeup, like you did for me. He’s worn eyeliner and shit for the band, but.” He shrugs one big shoulder, turning his attention back to his sketchbook. “We talked about it earlier, and he wants to.” 

“Wait,” Suzy says, because there have been _enough_ instances where she thought she understood what Arin - or Dan, for that matter - was getting at only to be proven exceptionally wrong shortly thereafter. “Does Dan wanna do drag, or?” 

It wouldn’t be the worst idea he’s ever had. He’s tall and too skinny, doesn’t have the build for it - especially compared to Arin, who Suzy has said many times would look good in a dress. But if he shaved his legs and straightened his hair or something, he could probably work something out. He’d have to find a good add-two-cups bra. 

“What?” Arin blinks at her, owlish and goofy in the lamplight. “No - babe. He wants to do a video like we did. Like, he didn’t say it, but he kinda said it.” 

“Where I did your makeup?” 

“Yeah!” 

She has to think for a moment, feels her mouth quirk up at the side while she does. Arin had put on a brave face for the camera but hadn’t liked it at all, clearly hadn’t expected how thick and alien the foundation and powder would feel, hadn’t anticipated how long it would actually take. Dan’s more sensitive than Arin (in pretty much every aspect, she thinks) but he possesses vastly more patience. 

“Huh,” she says, and then, before she can think herself out of it, “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

* * *

Once she manages to talk to him for a few minutes, it all sort of falls into place. Dan wants to do pretty much exactly what Arin said: “I was - there was this ASMR video,” he’d said to her, like that explained anything. “Where this chick put makeup on me - like, on the camera, but like she was putting it on me? And I swear to God I could feel it on my face, and it was like - holy shit, if that’s what getting makeup put on feels like I wanna do it _every day, forever._ ” 

“Well,” she had told him, “I hope I can live up to your expectations,” but she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that it’s probably not nearly as fun as his weird mouth noises videos made it seem. 

It takes some finagling, still, after that; all their schedules are weird - because of course Arin wants to be there, too - and then there’s deciding where they’ll film (“we can film at my place,” Dan tells her, “but our bathroom is tiny and awful”) and what time (“literally whenever”) and what exactly Dan wants done (“Suze, I trust you with my life, and also with my makeup”). And even then, after all that, it gets filmed at four in the afternoon on a Sunday, because Dan called Arin and said he had the next couple of hours free if they did. 

Suzy’s just glad she anxiety-cleaned her bathroom a couple of nights before. She doesn’t care if Dan sees their messy house - Dan makes his living sitting flush with Arin eight hours a day, and she has a hard time thinking that there’s _too_ much that can gross him out - but she does care about filming in a messy room, and she’s still tidying here and there when Dan shows up. 

It’s a quick setup. Dan told her that he doesn’t want to know what she does (“I like surprises! Just, like, no glitter? It’ll never come outta my hair”), so she’s just got everything laid out - her vague outline is mostly a dramatic smoky eye and the most ridiculous falsies she owns (the ones that aren’t twenty dollars a pair, anyway), but she doesn’t want either of them to know that yet; she sits Dan on the stool in front of the vanity and tries to figure out where she can stand without being in the way too much. 

“I am,” Dan announces, seconds after her intro, “so fucking excited for this.” Behind the camera, Arin cackles. 

He does better with the coverage than Arin did (“I had to go buy new foundation,” Suzy tells the camera, “because Danny and I aren’t _exactly_ the same shade”). He’s got good skin; it doesn’t take much to even him out, and he’s the last person Suzy knows that needs contour but she can’t help herself when cheekbones that defined are right in front of her. 

“No,” Dan says, laughing, “Suze, wait, that’s to make your face look skinnier, right? I’m gonna look like fuckin’ - fuckin’ Skeletor.” 

“You’ll look fine,” she tells him, tilts his head up with one hand underneath his jaw. The pad of her middle finger is resting against his pulse point and it’s thrumming under his skin like a hummingbird; she can’t decide if he’s nervous or just embarrassed. He gets a little bashful on camera sometimes, does better in groups where there are other people to deflect to. It’s okay when he’s Danny Sexbang, fuck-machine extraordinaire; it’s different when he’s just himself. “I’ll highlight, too. You’ll be pretty.” 

“What the fuck,” Dan says, all fake-offense, “are you trying to say I’m not already pretty?” 

“You’re already pretty,” Suzy means to say, but Arin gets there first, without quite as much mocking as Suzy expects. Dan opens his eyes to look at him, and he’s clearly startled for a second before he wrinkles his nose and says _you’re just jealous that Suzy called me pretty,_ like he really heard the tone of the joke that didn’t even come. 

The rest of the coverage is fine - he does look a little skeletal with the deep contour, but Suzy thinks he looks a little bit like some super-skinny Yugoslavian model - but he gets flinchy as soon as she tells him to keep his eyes closed. She expects it, but not necessarily how intense it is - she figures he’ll get over it after the first couple tries, but she’s out of luck; Dan twitches back like she’s shocking him. 

“I just know how close Arin is to me right now,” he says, and manages a panicky little giggle. His concerns aren’t unreasonable, all things considered, but she still sighs when he shies away from her brush the fourth time. 

“Danny,” she says, “stay _still._ ” She doesn’t sound irritated, or even necessarily impatient, but there’s something mostly-accidental in the tone of her voice that doesn’t invite argument, and - 

Dan stills. Just like that. 

The camera’s on his face, not hers, and it doesn’t catch when she looks at Arin over the top of it. Dan’s eyes are still obediently closed, and the tension he’s carrying high and tight through his shoulders melts, and maybe that’s why Arin’s grinning the small, satisfied grin of someone who knows a secret. 

_Huh,_ Suzy thinks. _Isn’t that something._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got too excited to wait to post this. Whoops!

“What are you thinking about,” Arin says to her that night, runs his fingertips over the back of her bare shoulder. 

Suzy does not say _tag-teaming our best friend_. 

“You know,” she says instead. “Stuff. Things.” 

Arin doesn’t take the obvious opening for a _Walking Dead_ joke, which is her first clue that he’s thinking about shit, too. She turns over to face him; he’s on his back, sheets pulled up just over his hips, eyes on her in the dim light from the streetlamps outside. The light catches in the hair that scatters over his chest and trails down to the soft swell of his belly and disappears underneath the sheet. He’s gorgeous. She thought so the minute she met him and she’s never stopped, but it just - hits her, sometimes, how pretty he is. She’d rather it hit her post-coital than in the office, at least. 

Arin looks at the ceiling when he realizes that she’s looking at him. He gets shy like that, sometimes, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever fail to find it charming - even if it does make her a little bit sad. 

“Today was fun,” he says eventually, soft and scratchy. It takes him a while; a comfortable silence starts and stretches, easy and warm. “With Dan here.” 

Suzy smiles to herself, turns to the pillow a little more to hide it. 

“Yeah,” she says, and leaps. “We should do stuff with him more.” 

Arin turns to look at her too quickly to be casual and it’s so obvious that Suzy would laugh if she didn’t think it would scare him away from saying whatever’s bouncing around inside his head. She reaches up to run her fingers through his hair instead, starts at his temple and skates lightly backwards. 

“You’re thinking,” she says, and scoots a little to kiss him on the mouth, gentle. “I can hear the gears turning.” 

“Yeah,” he murmurs. 

She lets it rest there for a while. It seems like something that can’t be pushed, or at least shouldn’t be; Arin’s clearly struggling to put his thoughts into words - or struggling to gather up the courage to say them if he’s got them. 

There’s no good way to tell him that she _knows_ , anyway. Arin’s insisted that he’s straight for as long as she’s known him - even with the D Club, even with the Cillian Murphy crush - and she’s played along for all that time, laughed at his jokes, made her own; if Arin doesn’t want to tell her, she’s not going to insist, and it isn’t like it really matters in the long run. Of all the things that he could choose not to share with her, she figures this is one of the more understandable options. 

But.

“Arin,” she says, quiet, and lets her hand drift from where it had been carding soft through his hair to rest on his cheek, run her thumb underneath his eye. “Hey. Talk to me.”

He fidgets a little, drums his fingers on his stomach where his hand rests on top of the sheet. “I dunno,” he mumbles. “Just. You know. Thinking.” 

She makes a little _mm-hmm_ noise, doesn’t take her eyes off of him. Sometimes you have to wait Arin out to get him to say what you’re waiting for, and she’s become exceedingly good at it; Arin takes a patience she didn’t know she had five years ago, but it’s not something she could ever complain about. 

It pays off, like she thinks it will. “...about Dan,” he says finally - after a while, two or three minutes of silence, maybe, of their combined breathing and Suzy’s fingers petting slow through his hair. “Like. Thinking about Dan in a way that a dude with a wife should _not_ be thinking about Dan,” and it all comes out in one sentence, one rush of air. 

“Oh,” Suzy says, because she'd expected it - of course she had - but for Arin to just _say_ it takes her aback a little.

He doesn’t say anything. He draws in a breath that shudders, just a little, and Suzy is hit with a fondness so deep it threatens to overwhelm her for a moment, two, three. “I love you,” she says then, even though it isn’t what she was intending to say, and scoots herself forward until she’s pressed against him again - like they were before, but easy, now, with none of the urgency of sex, only the quiet and stillness of comfort. “You big dumb idiot, I love you, did you think I’d be _mad_?” 

Arin wraps one big arm around her, buries his nose in her hair. “I didn’t know,” he says, mumbles it into her so quietly she can feel it more than hear it. 

There isn’t much she _can_ say, other than _I know, of course I know, I don’t know a time I didn’t know._ Some part of her (the logical, short part that sounds suspiciously like her mother) thinks that she should be at least a little upset, or hurt, or something - but it wouldn’t be real, and Suzy’s never had to fake shit with Arin before, doesn’t want to start now. Not over this. 

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” she murmurs, presses a kiss against his shoulder. “We can talk about it more in the morning. Okay?” 

“Okay.” 

“Okay.” She kisses him again, dots them up his shoulder to his neck to his cheek to his mouth when he shifts to meet her. 

Arin drifts off after that - which isn’t surprising, he had a long day even before he came home and quasi-admitted his longstanding crush to his wife - but Suzy’s awake for another hour, watching the streetlight shift on the ceiling as the breeze moves the dogwood leaves outside their bedroom window. She feels like she, by rights, should be taking notes on her phone, running through what she knows versus what she assumes versus what she expects, a rundown of the possible outcomes, phrasing, what’s likely to make Danny bolt. 

There’s nothing she can do at three o’clock in the morning that will stop her brain from chasing itself in circles, though. She told Arin they’d talk about it in the morning; until then, she can sleep.

* * *

“We can just,” Arin says, halfway through his second cup of coffee, “forget about last night. If you want. I’m totally cool with that.” 

There’s a tightness to his face that Suzy doesn’t see often, especially when it’s just the two of them, and he’s drumming his fingertips against the side of his mug in a nervous, uneven pattern. Arin is given to physical manifestations of his anxiety - she can’t even count the number of videos that feature his nervous foot-jiggle or leg-bounce - but it’s not often that it gets to that point with them. He is, she thinks, demonstrably _not_ totally cool with that. 

But for just a second, she considers it. 

The thing is, if they choose not to forget about it - if she and Arin do this, even if it starts and ends with bringing it up to Danny - there’s not really a going back. They’ll always know that there was a moment that this could have been more than just them - not even more in a numbers sense, more in a _more_ sense - and that even if the moment passed the potential didn’t. And if it starts with talking to Dan and goes somewhere else - 

Well.

“No,” she says, after what might be too long - but Arin still looks at her, drags his focus up from the contents of his mug. He’s leaning one hip against the counter, barefoot and sleep-rumpled. “Unless that’s what you want. It’s not what I want.” Her voice falters at the end, just a little. 

She can hear the breath he lets out, careful. 

“Okay.”


	3. Chapter 3

They don’t go in until that afternoon. Dan’s schedule is about as flexible as theirs - it turns out that you don’t really have to keep to normal, grownup hours when your primary job is playing video games and riffing with your best friend, and your _second_ job is being a rockstar in a Star of David-emblazoned jumpsuit - and he assures Arin that recording can wait until three or four. 

“Just,” Suzy says on the drive over, “feel him out, you know? Don’t, like, feel him _up_. But. You know what I mean.” 

“You’re a nightmare,” Arin huffs, but he’s grinning when he leans over to kiss her at a red light. “I know what you mean. I think.” 

“Hit on him,” she says helpfully. “Probably not in front of people, though.” 

“I’ve been hitting on him for months, and nobody’s noticed anything. Or at least said anything.”

Suzy shrugs one shoulder, checks herself in the mirror. They’re both a little understated today; they’d ended up talking on the couch, cross-legged and facing each other, for way longer than she thinks either one of them meant to, but - at least they’d gotten everything aired out. _We’re, like - we’re kind of dating him already,_ she had said bluntly. _If you think about it._ Arin had mumbled _I guess I never thought of it like that,_ but he’d gone on to say that she was right, and then asked what she thought they should do about it. 

She’s usually a planner. She isn’t sure this is the kind of situation one _plans_ for. 

“I noticed,” she says. “But Ross would have said something if he had, and Barry would have said something to Ross, so.” She wishes she were wrong; Ross and Barry make her feel like she’s a student teacher in a room full of eighth grade softball players sometimes. 

“Huh,” Arin says, and remains quiet until they get to the office. 

Once they get there, though, he’s just like always, gregarious and good-natured, and it isn’t until Suzy’s been at her own desk for about forty-five minutes that she realizes what he’s even doing. He’s with Ross when she catches it, one arm slung over Ross’ shoulders, in the middle of a conversation with Matt and Ryan that Ross doesn’t seem to be a significant part of. Ross looks apprehensive, like a small dog being unexpectedly picked up, and maintains that look an hour later when he ends up in the same position in the kitchen. _You’re, uh,_ he says, finally gracelessly disentangling himself, _you’re snuggly today, huh, man?_

It’s a little less weird when it’s Barry, but Barry still gives Suzy whale-eyes, where he seems like he’s trying to ask her something without actually using his words. He does that a lot when Arin’s being particularly weird, and it’s that that convinces Suzy that she should probably actually pull Arin aside at some point before the evening’s recording session. 

It takes longer than she’d like to get him into one of the storage rooms (“we’re gonna make out,” she says cheerfully to Ryan’s puzzled, vaguely concerned look, and he goes back to what he was doing immediately) and get the door shut behind them. “Okay, wait,” she says, “are you trying to make him jealous? Or something? I’m confused about your angle here.” 

“Jealous of who? _Ross?_ ”

“You were all over him! And Barry!” 

“I’m trying to make it not weird! If I’m just hitting on him he’ll notice, I gotta hit on everybody!” 

Suzy pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and immediately feels like a cross between her mother and a cartoon character. She’s getting the distinct impression that Arin is throwing this a little. 

“Okay,” she says after a moment. “This is why he thinks you’re just friends. Because that’s, like, the definition of _just friends_ behavior, when you specifically do the same thing with people you’re _actually_ just friends with.” 

“Right,” Arin says. 

“So,” she continues. “Have you seen him at all today?” 

“A little.” Arin crosses his arms and looks towards the door. “He’s busy. He’s been Skyping Brian about band stuff all day.” 

Arin is definitely not jealous of Brian Wecht, who is married and kind of old and also Dan’s best friend, and _presumably_ straight. Suzy decides that immediately, mostly to save her own sanity. 

“When are you recording tonight?” 

Arin fidgets. “Six?”

“So you’ll be here til late,” Suzy says, and settles with her back against the door. Arin’s watching her while she thinks, drumming his fingers against his arm where his hand is resting. “Which means he’ll be tired, and he gets cuddly when he’s tired, so. Let him, I think?”

“Let him get cuddly? I always let him get cuddly.” 

“Right, but, like.” She shrugs. “I dunno. Cuddle him back? You don’t always do that.” Arin almost never does that. She knows he has, but she can’t think of when the last time she saw it was - maybe a picture Ross sent her sometime around last Thanksgiving, where Dan had nodded off on Arin’s chest and Arin had draped one arm around Dan’s shoulders, head tipped against the back of the couch, snoring. The timeline matches up with what Arin had told her about when things started changing for him, before Danny left over winter to go back to Jersey for a while. 

“Or, like,” Arin starts, and then pauses like he has to consider what he’s saying. “Or I could start it. Instead of waiting for him to get tired? Because then he’d be asleep and wouldn’t remember.” 

He sounds a little like he’s trying to justify the idea, but Suzy figures that she’ll let him if he needs to. Sometimes he’s got to talk himself through a problem to get to the answer, even if he’s posing it like he’s looking for her advice. 

“Danny’s, like. An octopus made of snuggles,” she says, and leans up to kiss him. “There’s no way he’d turn that down.” 

Arin kisses her back, a little more deeply than she anticipates. “You sure you’re cool with this,” he murmurs after it breaks, both hands on her hips. “It’s not too late to bail.” 

“One hundred percent cool with this,” she says. “Possibly even cooler with it than you.” 

“Doubtful.” Arin’s hand moves to rest on her ass, casual, like maybe she won’t notice. “I had a vague, like, semi-crush on him before he even joined. The _hips_ , man.” He says it between kisses, fragmented, but she still laughs when he finishes. 

“Okay,” she says, “maybe you have longevity. But you seriously have _no idea_ how long I’ve thought about getting to watch you fuck Danny in our bed.” She punctuates it with a kiss and grins at Arin’s stunned silence, reaches behind her to open the door. 

“Anyway,” she says sweetly, “I have to finish editing. Let me know how it goes tonight, okay?” 

“Okay,” he says belatedly, sounds a little dazed - she’s not looking, already walking back to the office space, and then - “Wait - I thought you told Ryan we were gonna make out!”

* * *

She leaves by seven, and Dan and Arin are ass-deep in whatever they’re playing - Arin told her, but she’d been thinking about everything else and it had flown past her. She wants to poke her head in and see how it’s going but doesn’t - she feels like it’ll spook one of them, if not both, and Arin will tell her how it went when he gets home, anyway. 

She doesn’t end up having to wait that long - she’s in the middle of making dinner (chicken and rice and broccoli, easy for Arin to throw in the microwave and tasty enough that he’ll actually want it instead of going through a drive-through on the way) when her Snapchat notification goes off on her phone. Mochi mews at the ding, wraps himself around her bare ankles.

“Hush,” she tells him, and unlocks her phone. She’s got notifications from Matt and Ryan both and opens Ryan’s first - it’s less likely to be bizarre, she figures; Matt has a good sense of humor but it generally takes a turn for the distinctly fucking weird, especially compared to Arin’s. 

It’s a picture, and at first it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on until her eyes adjust to the off-blue glow of the TV. Dan’s wrapped up in the grey comforter that usually finds a home on the back of the couch, knees pulled up, leaned all the way over into Arin’s space; Arin’s turned mostly towards him, one arm around Dan’s shoulders, precariously holding the controller with both hands while Dan’s head lays on his chest. There’s no way he’s playing the game anything like it’s supposed to be, and the recording is probably suffering for it, but it’s not like Dan nods off often enough for it to matter. 

Either way, Suzy thinks, it’s impossibly fucking cute. Dan’s eyes are open, but only barely, and it’s clear that neither of them notice Ryan and his phone - the angle makes her think he’s got to be taking it from Barry’s little makeshift office. 

Matt’s is a picture, too, of effectively the same thing from a different angle, but his has a caption - _long night, yr husband is being SEDUCED & we are witness_. 

Fuck, she wishes. That would make this whole thing easier. If Dan would just go ahead and seduce Arin, Arin would stop wigging the fuck out over Dan being a potential real-life heterosexual, and they could just talk to him like a self-aware couple of handsome queer young people. 

She screenshots Matt’s and sends it to Arin, adds _I want details in the morning_. He doesn’t message back until she’s washing her makeup off and tying her hair back for bed, and it’s sitting there unread on her phone by the time she gets back to the bedroom with Mimi hot on her heels. She takes a moment to open it, suddenly the tiniest bit apprehensive - everything looked fine in the pictures, but what if it got weird after? 

_Oh you’ll get them_ , he says, and she lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. 

_Good,_ she texts back, grinning, bottom lip between her teeth. _I can’t wait._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to [this cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqmSeJ16dog) of Damien Rice's "Delicate" pretty much the whole way through writing this chapter, so I would say it's pretty excellent mood music if you're into that kind of thing.

The details, when Suzy gets them, aren't exactly salacious. She didn't expect them to be - having to convince her husband that _cuddling_ Dan was fine didn't really lend itself to high hopes for an impromptu handjob - but there's a genuine excitement in Arin's voice when he says _he just laid there all snuggled up to my chest for like three episodes_ , and that's more than enough. 

_See,_ she wants to say, but doesn't, _what did I tell you_ , and kisses the top of his head instead on her way to sit down with him at the kitchen table. They almost never used to have breakfast together, but it was one of their New Year's resolutions to sit down and making more time for Arin-and-Suzy, and breakfast - or at least coffee - felt like one of the more natural ways to do it. By this late in the year, it's second nature, and Arin doesn't like being alone in bed, anyway. 

"So," she says, and Arin pauses halfway through his bite of oatmeal. "Are you still feeling good about this?" 

Suzy knows well that he isn't shy about speaking with his mouth full, but he chews and swallows thoughtfully before he says anything. "Yeah," he says finally. "Yeah, I feel really good about it. I think maybe we should give it a few days, though." 

Suzy brings her coffee up to her mouth, holds it there for a moment before she takes a drink, watching him. It doesn't feel like Arin's hedging. "Okay. How come?" 

"He just, like." Arin pauses for a moment, then shrugs. "When he woke up last night, he apologized, like, six times. And it was kind of about the recording, because obviously he nodded off and people are gonna notice? But it was also 'cause he fell asleep on top of me, and I think he thought I was fuckin' - weirded out or something." 

There's another pause, then, "Which, like. I've been a weird asshole about that stuff for a while, so. I get it." 

"Yeah," Suzy says, a touch sympathetically, and lets that settle for a moment. Arin stirs his blueberries into his oatmeal a little morosely. "What are you thinking?" 

"Uh.” Arin pulls a face at his bowl, scrunches up his nose a little. “Mostly that I'm an asshole." 

"I don't think you're that bad," she says diplomatically. "You didn't know how to deal with it. Being weird was probably all you could think of.” 

"That makes me sound awesome." 

"Awesome people sometimes do less than awesome things," Suzy says. "You weren't trying to hurt him. You don't even know if you did." 

Arin shrugs again, uncomfortable, and Suzy knows it's probably about time for this conversation to end. "I guess," he says. "He just, like. He specifically said 'sorry, that was super weird of me' when he woke up, though. So obviously he thinks I'm gonna be - you know?"

"Yeah," she says. "We just have to work on it. He'll figure it out sooner or later." She's quiet for a moment, then, "The whole cuddling thing clearly worked out, so maybe just being more - you know - more tactile and stuff is a good idea."

"Yeah," Arin says eventually. "I was thinking about getting dinner with him tonight between episodes, too. Getting out of the studio for a while."

"That's a really good idea," Suzy says, a little surprised by how pleased and proud she is in turns that Arin is taking initiative - not just in deciding to try something but in telling her that he's considering it. "Will you tell me how it goes?” 

“Of course,” Arin says. “You’re stuck with this now, lady. Get ready for me texting you a billion times a night to make sure I’m not doing something stupid. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had to _woo_ someone?” 

She leans across the table to kiss him, feels him smiling against her mouth despite himself. “I do,” she says. “And if I’m remembering right, you’re _pretty_ okay at it.”

“Oh, good,” he says. “This should be a snap, then.”

* * *

It’s not quite the snap that maybe Arin thinks it’ll be. 

Nothing goes wrong, or anything - Arin takes him out to dinner a couple times, they take him out together a couple of times, he sits in Arin’s fucking _lap_ during a development meeting (admittedly, that meeting is really just with Suzy and Ross) - but that’s almost the problem. It feels like they reach a new point of comfort with each other and can’t go further, and it’s almost three weeks before Arin finally seems to crack a little. 

“I think we should talk to him tomorrow,” he says, late on a Thursday night. “Like. Talk to him about this stuff.” 

“Oh,” Suzy says, and blinks. 

“Do you think we shouldn’t?” 

“No,” she says, “I think we should, absolutely. That’s just.” She pauses, thinks, then, “More of a jump than I expected from you.” 

“Like, honestly? I wanna call him right now and talk to him,” Arin says, and twists his fingers in and out of the edge of the comforter. “But I recognize that that is fucking crazy, and that there are appropriate methods of doing this, and calling him at midnight on a Thursday isn’t one of them.” 

“Okay,” Suzy says, grins a little at him, because Arin’s taken the tone he uses when he’s very deliberately doing what his therapist calls _discussing his emotions in an open and thoughtful manner_ , “that’s good,” and Arin blinks at her for just a moment before he huffs out a laugh and says _don’t fuckin’ patronize me_ , rolls to bury his face in his pillow like he’s embarrassed. 

Suzy takes that opportunity to scoot closer to him, dots his shoulder with kisses. “I’m proud of you,” she murmurs. “This is gonna be fine.”

* * *

They decide that morning that they should talk to him first thing - to get it out of the way, they decide, and so they won't be nervous all day long and weird around him, because Dan's sensitive like a cat and will be able to tell that they're on edge and that'll make _him_ on edge - but Arin's inside the building for approximately forty-five seconds before he turns to Suzy and says "I can't do this yet." 

"Okay," she says reflexively. Part of her expected it. "We can give it another couple days."

He shakes his head, hair flopping into his eyes a little. It’s raining outside, and he'd stood out in it for a little bit while Suzy hustled inside with her satchel over her head. The droplets on his face and neck have already dried but his hair is still damp, leaving little rivulets down the collar of his shirt, and Suzy reaches out with one hand to touch where they've soaked in already. 

"Later," he says. "Like, this afternoon. I wanna do it today, I just gotta - you know." 

She doesn't know, but she thinks she can make an educated guess if it comes down to it, so she nods like she does anyway and leans up to kiss him on the mouth. 

"Thanks," he murmurs. 

_Mm-hmm,_ she hums, and then _I love you_. He kisses her that time, says it back when it's just barely broken, _love you back_ with his lips brushing hers.

* * *

It's the right moment after lunch. They all go out - Suzy kind of wishes it had just been the three of them, but Barry and Ross and Matt and Ryan come too, everyone piled into a corner booth together, and even if Ryan and Matt seem to notice that Arin and Dan are pressed up flush against each other when there's really enough room to space out, they don't say anything. 

Lunch takes a while, like it always does when more than two members of the crew go out together, but Arin covers the bill and tips the amount over again ( _I was a waiter a couple different times,_ he told her once, a long time ago, when they weren't exactly well-off and he still tipped what she felt was an exorbitant amount) and that seems to give everyone free reign to lounge and talk and day drink, Ross and Matt clutching garish pink cocktails in hurricane glasses. 

Dan ends up with his head on Arin's shoulder halfway through, clearly only half-listening to the story Barry's telling - he's probably heard it before, a thousand times too polite to say so but not a good enough actor to keep himself focused. He is, Suzy thinks with a pang of fondness, very cute. Arin has good taste. 

She has good taste, too, is the thing. She thinks of it the wrong way sometimes - like it's Arin's idea, and she's along for the ride - but Dan catches her watching him and grins wide and sleepy at her and she finds herself grinning back immediately, ducking her head to dig in her purse for her phone like she felt it vibrate. 

She leans up to talk to him when everyone is dispersing back to their Ubers, catches him gently around the arm. "Hey," she says, up on her tiptoes so she can say it more or less in his ear, and the little shiver afterwards is probably because it's chilly and he runs cold all the time anyway. "Can you come by Arin's office when we get back?" 

"For sure," he says, and wraps one arm around her shoulders, squeezes for a moment. "Everything okay?" His chin is on top of her head, and he's done it a thousand times before but she feels like maybe she's never noticed his heartbeat quite that close until now. 

"Yeah," she says, and slips both arms around his skinny waist. "Definitely."

* * *

He takes a few minutes, which is good; it gives Arin a little while to prepare, even if that preparation seems like it's maybe mostly comprised of pacing and running his hand through his hair. Suzy's standing with the small of her back leaned against the edge of Arin's big desk, doesn't really like sitting around the two of them while they're standing in the first place - it's bullshit that they're so much taller and it's a deciding factor in how many pairs of heels she owns - but as soon as Dan opens the door and blinks at them, she wishes she had. 

"Uh," he says, and closes the door behind him as soon as he's stepped inside. "Kinda feel like I'm getting fired." 

"What?" Arin says, and sounds so legitimately confused that Suzy can see a little bit of the tightness drop away from Dan's shoulders. "No, dude. Fuck no." 

"Okay," Dan says, and grins a little nervously. "Just, uh. You were doing the hair thing, it looks like, so." 

Arin reaches up to fix his hair in whatever manner he thinks he can without a mirror, gives up after a few seconds. "Everything's cool," he says, only somewhat unconvincingly, but Dan nods like he believes him anyway because he's a good man. 

"Have you, uh," Arin says after a moment, and Suzy looks at him, because this isn't what they discussed. His eyes are closed for a little bit longer than a blink. He’s steeling himself, she thinks. "You remember that time we spent, like, half an episode talking about polyamory? And how it's a good idea sometimes?”

"Yeah," Dan says, and then looks at Suzy, and then back at Arin. 

"That's," Suzy starts, and clears her throat. "That's, um. What we wanted to talk about." She finishes a little lamely, goes through the whole plan in her head, how she had intended on saying three times as much and how none of it had anything to do with jokes they made during recording. There had been a _script_ , practically, there had been a theoretical conversation about whether Dan was seeing anyone (he isn’t, he’s been agonizingly single for at least two years and that doesn’t seem likely to change) and whether he wanted to (he very much does, from what she understands) and then they would take it from there, and -

There’s a long pause. 

“Holy shit,” Dan says finally, eyes moving back and forth between them. “Jesus Christ, guys, I thought you were fuckin’ serious for a second, don’t do that shit!” 

Suzy looks at Arin. He looks like he might throw up. _Oh,_ Suzy thinks, lets it flicker through her head for just a moment: they were wrong, they didn’t think this through, Dan is, somehow, miraculously actually _straight_ , or at least not interested in banging his best friends, they completely fucked this up, things are going to be weird forever now, what if they just ruined Grumps - 

And then Dan laughs, and it’s tinged with just a little bit of panic. “So, uh,” he says, and can’t seem to stop looking at both of them, first Arin, then her, like they’ve got him backed into a corner. He’s still grinning, but the corners of his mouth are tight in an unfamiliar way, like it’s one more minute of bad acting away from becoming a full-on grimace. 

“We aren’t kidding.” Suzy says it before she can think herself out of it, and Arin says _yeah_ next to her, can’t seem to look at Dan anymore. 

Dan giggles with what Suzy feels is a touch of hysteria. “What?” 

“I like you,” Arin says, largely to the floor. “Like. I’m super fucking into you, dude, and Suzy’s into you, too.”

“Wait,” Dan manages, after a frankly agonizing silence. “Are you guys swingers now?” 

“ _No,_ ” Arin says, and Suzy knows that he only sounds so sure about it because they had that exact conversation about four days prior. “We’ve never - we don’t wanna do the fuckin’ - the swingers thing, or the open relationship thing, we just.” He takes a breath that shakes and Dan steps forward reflexively. “It’s not, like, _oh, let’s do the open thing, I bet Dan would do it_ , it’s like - it’s like, _oh, fuck, we both really like Dan_.”

Dan eeks out an _oh_ that Suzy isn’t sure Arin hears until her husband says, quietly, “Dude, you don’t - if you aren’t cool with it, all you gotta do is say so. Okay? It’s not a big thing.” 

“I’m cool with it,” Dan says, near immediately, and Suzy feels something with wings swoop from her chest to her throat, because that isn’t a yes but it definitely isn’t a no. “I’m - have you guys thought this through? Like, for serious thought about it?” 

“Yeah,” she says, and tries to meet his eyes. He won’t look up from the floor. “We’ve been talking about it for - for a while. A couple months.” 

“Oh,” Dan says again, and gets quiet for a little bit. Suzy feels like neither she or Arin are breathing, like they’re trying not to break whatever little spell Dan’s fallen into. “I, uh,” he says finally, shifts nervously from one foot to the other. “Are you sure?” He's not asking about the length of time they've discussed it. 

“ _Yes,_ ” Arin says, and there’s more real earnestness in his voice than Suzy has heard in a _long_ time. “Dude, we are so sure. We are _absurdly_ sure.”

Dan lets out a breath, slow and careful. “You’re really not kidding,” he says, and Suzy’s the one that says it again, _we’re really not kidding,_ gentle. 

“Come over tonight,” Arin says suddenly, and that’s not part of the plan either, but going off-script seems like it’s panned out so far, so Suzy’s not too miffed. “If - if you wanna. Think about it, and come over tonight, and we can talk about it then.” 

Dan looks at Suzy first, bottom lip caught between his teeth, and he’s smiling again but there’s no tension in it, not even a hint of the panic that tightened it before. “I don’t need to think about it,” he says, and spots of color rise on his cheeks almost immediately, like either he knew how corny that was or didn’t mean to say it or both. “Uh - I’ll come over at like - at eight. Does that work?” 

“Yeah,” Arin says, and smiles back, and Suzy’s not sure she’s seen him look that relieved in recent memory. “Eight’s awesome.” 

“Okay.” Dan reaches for the doorknob and fumbles with it. “Okay. Cool. Uh - I’ll see you then.” 

“See you then,” Suzy says, and doesn’t hug Arin until after the door’s shut behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got away from me a little bit and is much longer than I intended! I thought about breaking it into two chapters but couldn't find a good spot, so it'll just be extra-long. 
> 
> Tonight's soundtrack: [first half part one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3gnxO8bUxQ) \+ [first half part two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USom8PhOXgs), [last half](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUaRPpnsfb4).

Eight o’clock comes faster than it has any right to, Suzy thinks. 

They leave the office earlier than they probably should, but neither of them can focus after their talk with Dan; she’s got most of a video to finish editing, but she spends three or four minutes just staring at the screen before she finally closes out of the program altogether. She’s not going to get anything done for the rest of the day, and neither, she thinks, is Arin; when she texts him at five to ask if he wants to head out, he replies affirmatively almost immediately. 

Dinner is quiet and private at home, just the two of them. They know better than to try to incorporate Dan into their mealtimes; the others are all good dinner guests, and if they’re having the whole group over it seems to go fairly well, but Dan on his own practically vibrates with nervous energy, picking at his plate and pushing food around until he thinks he’s tricked people into believing that he’s eaten. It’s just a Dan Thing, Suzy realized long ago, and she doubts she’ll ever understand most of his Dan Things, but they don’t hurt anyone - other than him, sometimes - so she doesn’t fuss over them too much, just works around them when she can. 

Arin takes a shower after they eat and that he doesn’t ask her to join tells Suzy loudly and clearly that he needs some alone time to either decompress or gather his thoughts or both. She stays downstairs, gives him however long he needs even after the water shuts off; dishes only take a few minutes but both cats are following her around and yowling, so she crosses _play with cats_ off of her mental chores list as soon as she adds it and digs out their laser pointer. 

He doesn’t come back downstairs until almost seven thirty, and even then he’s quieter than she expects; Arin talks his way through his nerves unless something is really wrong, and she can’t quite tell if he’s genuinely calm or if he’s freaked himself out so much throughout the day that he’s finally reached some sort of zen. He says _hi_ back when she says it, though, and even if it’s quiet he still says it, so she counts that as a win. 

“You okay?” she asks after a few moments, watching him watch Mochi. 

“Yeah,” he says, not as quickly as she’s expecting. He had to think about it a little, she thinks. “Just thinking.” 

She doesn’t ask _about what_ , just waits. 

It comes after Mochi’s made two mad dashes across the living room floor and attempted to climb the far wall in vain. “What are we gonna talk about?” 

She shrugs, glances up at him from her spot on the floor. “I, like,” she starts, and thinks for a moment. “I really wanted to plan this out. You know? I had a script for earlier, but then you said what you said and it worked, so.” She’s quiet for a minute or so, listens to Mochi purring where he’s rubbing against Arin’s ankles. “I don’t think we should think about it too hard. It’s Dan. We’ll know what to say.” 

“I hope so,” Arin says, and that’s her cue to get up and sit next to him, head nestled on his shoulder, until there’s Dan’s signature shave-and-a-haircut knock on the front door. 

She leans up to kiss him, then, careful and slow, and he kisses back for a little bit longer than usual before he finally breaks away. “We should let him in,” he murmurs, presses his forehead to hers. He closes his eyes. “Or he’s gonna think we changed our minds.” 

He isn’t wrong. Dan has a tendency to jump to the worst possible conclusion, especially where personal relationships are involved, and it’s already been a good thirty seconds since he knocked the first time - and as if on cue, Arin’s phone buzzes. “I’ll get it,” Suzy says, presses another quick kiss against his lips before she stands up. 

Dan’s biting at the inside of his cheek when she opens the door, standing there with his hands in his pockets like he doesn't know what to do with them while he waits. "Hey," he says, and his face breaks into a smile that has more than a little relief in it. 

"Hi," she says, and hugs him, and she can feel that he's startled in the way he tenses up for a second but it's gone just after that and he's hugging her back, long arms wrapped loosely around her and squeezing for just a moment. When they pull apart she's looking up at him and he's looking down at her, and that's about when she looks away, feels her cheeks heating just a little. 

"The kettle’s going inside," she says then, instead of _I think I want to kiss you,_ which is what she'd sort of like to say. "So there’s tea. And Arin." 

"Oh, good," Dan says, "excellent, I'll take the tea," and Arin says _I heard that, motherfucker_ from the living room with no vitriol in his voice. 

When they get through the entryway - Dan is the only person Suzy knows that remembers to take his shoes off at the door, every time - Arin's on the couch with both cats in his lap. "I can't get up," he says plaintively, "I'm trapped," and Mimi peeps out an agreeable little _mew!_ in response. Dan pauses to scritch Mimi's cheeks and the base of Mochi's tail, and it looks for a moment like he's about to do the same to Arin's hair before he stops himself and makes his way into the kitchen.

"Just so you know, you can totally pet my husband," Suzy says, but only after he's poured himself a cup of boiling water. She doesn't want him to drop it mid-sentence. 

"It is, like," Dan starts, and rummages through the cabinet where they keep their tea and coffee, seems to cling to that for a moment as a reason to not have to finish what he was saying. "Really hard to not immediately make a joke about fucking him now. Like, my brain was immediately like _oh ho ho, I'll do more than pet him,_ except that's not a joke anymore, and what the fuck." 

"Yeah," Suzy says, a little sympathetically. Dan’s digging for the box of the impossibly strong cinnamon tea they keep for him and finally finds it, dunks a teabag into his cup as soon as the wrapper is off. “He said something like that a couple days ago, too. Apparently the whole talk about him blowing you in the episode that went up on Wednesday is, like. A little different now.” 

Dan chokes on nothing and his face immediately reddens. “Fuck,” he says eloquently, and Suzy laughs out loud, reaches across the little bit of distance between them to put her hand on his arm. “Come on,” she says, “Arin’s got Overwatch going, I think. I made cookies last night if you’re hungry.” 

“I’m good,” he says, and leans into the contact, lets her skate her hand up from his arm to his shoulder to his hair, tuck it behind his ear. He shivers a little when her fingertips brush over the shell. “Dibs on Mei, though.”

* * *

He sits next to Arin, of course, and he and Suzy trade off on the other PS4 for a few rounds. There’s the obvious sandwich joke - he’s right in between the two of them - but nobody makes it, miraculously. Suzy’s not sure if Arin knew that playing something at the beginning would relax Dan or if he decided it to relax himself, but it was a good plan either way; by nine o’clock, Dan’s collapsing into her to laugh while Arin does a furious and surprisingly good Torbjorn impression after his sixth death-by-turret in two and a half minutes. 

“God,” Arin says finally, “I gotta stop, I’m gonna have nightmares about goddamn Widowmaker and I don’t wanna ruin her for myself,” and tosses his controller to the floor just before he stretches out like a cat, both arms over his head. Suzy’s watching him, and then watches Dan watch him. Dan’s long fingers are wrapped around his mug, eyes on the strip of skin between the hem of Arin’s shirt and the waist of his joggers. 

“You’re really,” Dan starts, and stops himself, and Arin, to his credit, plays it as cool as Suzy thinks he’s probably able. “You know. You’re really a thing,” he manages finally, and Suzy loves the little grin that steals across her husband’s face. 

“That’s what I aim for,” he says, “a general, corporeal form.” 

“Your corporeal form is awesome,” Dan says, and Suzy can’t help but to think _fuck yes_ when he meets Arin’s eyes. She feels like she’s watching the series finale of her favorite show of all time and everything is going exactly the way she predicted, only with the billion-times-better bonus of being right in front of her, _and_ the possibility of getting laid. _Double_ laid, even. 

“If I didn’t know better,” Arin says, “I would think you were hitting on me,” and for just a second Suzy thinks Dan’s going to kiss him. He shifts forward a little, and takes his bottom lip between his teeth, and she can’t see exactly where he’s looking but she thinks it’s at Arin’s mouth.

He doesn’t, though. He looks at Suzy, instead, who knows she’s grinning a little smugly and can’t help it, doesn’t want to stop it. “Yeah, Dan,” she says, “that’s crazy talk, though, right?” 

Dan takes a breath and Suzy can feel her smile fading. Arin’s watching them both, pensive and quiet. “We should, like,” he says, and clears his throat. Mimi takes that opportunity to slink into his lap from where she’d been perched on the back of the couch, purring like a motorboat and rubbing herself over his arms like she’s never known love and affection in her stubby little life. “We should talk about things, probably?” 

“Probably,” Arin says agreeably, and a silence falls that isn’t quite uncomfortable, interrupted only by Miri’s happy little _prrp_ s as Dan scritches either side of her whiskers. 

"I think it might be easiest if we just ask each other questions,” Suzy says finally. She feels a little like she should have had a plan for how this particular conversation is meant to go. “And just get everything out of the way now? You know? So we’re not freaking out about something a month from now.” 

“Yeah,” Arin says. “Are you cool with that?” 

“For sure,” Dan says, and she’s not sure how honest he’s being because he won’t really look at either of them. Dan’s usually the one that pushes communication - whenever Arin and Ross get into their little tiffs, it always seems like he’s the one dragging them into Arin’s office to make up - but she’s seen him clam up when he’s the target, and it looks like maybe that’s what he’s doing now. 

Arin’s the one that takes the leap, which surprises Suzy a little but impresses her more. “Is there anything you wanna ask us?” 

Dan looks like he’s thinking for a little bit, tapping his fingertips against thigh in a nervous, jerky pattern. “Is this, like,” he starts, and clears his throat, and that’s when he actually does look at them. “I’m cool with whatever? But is this, like. Just a sex thing? Or.” 

Suzy looks at Arin, and Arin looks at Suzy, and for a second neither of them know what to say. “No,” Suzy says finally. “Not unless that’s all you want out of it.” 

“Okay,” Dan says, and she can hear him swallow. His fingers have stilled. “I can’t really do the just sex thing. Like - not with you guys.” 

He’s never been able to do the _just sex_ thing, they all know that. He’s got to have some kind of connection with someone to sleep with them, and one night stands that really are just one night stands have a long and storied history of making him abjectly miserable. 

“That’s not what we want,” Arin says, and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “If we just wanted a hookup we’d, like, get on Tinder or something. We wouldn’t do that with you.” 

“Okay,” Dan says, “because I’m fuckin’ sensitive,” and he means it as a joke but all three of them know there’s truth in it. 

“How do you wanna deal with the office,” Arin asks after another stretch of silence - more comfortable, this time, and Dan seems like he’s relaxed a little, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders and hands. 

“What are the options?” It takes Dan a little while to ask, which tells Suzy that, at least, his immediate response wasn’t _pretend everything’s the same_. She’s not sure if that’s what she wants or not. She thinks maybe it isn’t. 

“Well,” she says, and they both shift to look at her at the same time, which is way more cute than unnerving but still a little bit of the latter. “We can tell them. We could do the whole staff meeting thing with the people that need to know and just - you know. Kind of update them. Or we can let it go and let them figure it out and confirm it if they ask. Or we can just - pretend everything’s the same as it was.” 

It feels a little absurd, saying it like something has changed in some huge, drastic way since this morning, but in some ways it feels like it has. 

“I like the second one,” Dan says, and his voice is surprisingly small. He’s looking at his hands again instead of at Suzy. Mimi has seemingly decided that she’s done with face pets and has wrapped herself up in a long-haired little ball on Dan’s lap, tail tucked comfortably over her nose. 

“Yeah,” Arin says, “me too,” and Suzy hums in agreement, reaches over to run her fingertips from Mimi’s head to the base of her tail. 

Another silence falls. Suzy scoots a little closer to Dan, mostly under the guise of petting Mimi more comfortably. Her wingspan was more than adequate where she was at, but she doesn’t think Dan is going to call her out. 

"So, like," Arin starts. He pauses after that, examines the hem of his shirt while he fucks with it a little. There’s a thread loose. "I've never actually done anything with a guy. Like - other than what you know already." Talking about the D Club in all of its homoerotic, no-homo glory feels fucking silly now, Suzy thinks, and she's sort of glad Arin feels the same way, even though she doesn't want him to feel ashamed of it. 

"No, yeah," Dan says, and fidgets a little, fucking with the cuticle on his thumbnail. He picks at himself when he’s anxious, Suzy knows, and only then does she notice the little bloodied spots littered all over his nail beds and cuticles where he’s been fucking with them all day. "Same. But, like, it probably isn't. You know. That hard to figure out?" 

"Yeah," Arin says, and then "plus I've seen a fucking ton of gay porn," and Suzy's the first one to crack, giggling out loud with one hand pressed over her mouth. Arin's not _lying_ \- they've watched a lot of it together recently - but still. 

“Jesus Christ,” Dan says, and has the gall to look scandalized for a minute before he says _yeah, like - same, though_ like he’s admitting something. Suzy giggles at that, too, but it’s not quite funny, and Arin smiles but that’s it. They both, she thinks, are thinking about the same thing. 

“So, uh,” Dan says, and for a moment Suzy thinks he’s going to say he has to leave, and _that’s_ not where she thought the night was going to go - she’s not sure where, exactly, she anticipated it ending up, but it definitely didn’t include Dan bailing out at nine thirty. He shifts, and then looks at her, and then at Arin, and she thinks: _oh_. “I really. Um. Can I kiss you?” 

“Which one,” Arin says, and there’s a note of teasing in his voice with a gentleness that tells Suzy that he knows exactly which one of them Dan’s talking about. 

“Fuck off,” Dan huffs, and apparently understands the answer without either of them saying it, because he leans forward to meet Arin’s mouth in what looks to be a more tentative kiss than he intended; there’s a confidence in his movements that the kiss betrays a little, faltering and a little hesitant. Suzy watches avidly, puts one hand on the back of Dan’s arm to stroke the pad of her thumb over his warm skin, and notices with no small measure of satisfaction that Arin’s smiling against Dan’s mouth. 

It isn’t a quick thing. She’s not surprised that Dan seems to be just as good a kisser as Arin, but she _is_ a little surprised that Arin is pulling out the stops already; he’s got one hand on the back of Dan’s neck, threading his fingers up into his hair, and she might be hearing things but she’s pretty sure there’s a pleased little _hmm_ from one of them somewhere in there.

“Hey,” Arin says, once the kiss is finally, finally broken, and bites his bottom lip. “I think we’re ignoring somebody.” 

“No, no,” Suzy says, “by all means,” and she means for it to be a little sarcastic but it comes out genuine and just a little breathless instead. They both look at her, and Dan’s pupils are blown wide in his dark eyes, spots of color dabbed on his high cheekbones. Arin looks as pleased as Dan looks debauched. 

Dan echoes Arin’s _hey_ but his is a murmur, and she’s not sure if it’s that or his gaze dropping to her mouth that makes her breath catch in her throat. His bottom lip is a little swollen, she notices, and realizes with something of a jolt that Arin had been biting it, and that, for some reason, is what prompts her to initiate it, moves her to shift forward and kiss him.

Behind Dan, Arin says _this is fucking amazing_. He’s shifted so that he’s behind Dan instead of sitting next to him, positioned himself so he can put his hands on him without wrenching a shoulder or something, and after that Suzy’s not sure what he’s doing; her eyes are closed, and the hand that was on the back of Dan’s arm has moved to wrap around it, clutching him a little tighter than is probably necessary. He’s got a hand on her waist that feels like it’s burning through her clothes, though, so she figures they’re even. 

He _is_ a good kisser. Like Arin, but sweet where her husband is direct, and quicker to explore; Arin is all steady pressure and Suzy is the first to bite at his lip or lick into his mouth, but Dan is nipping at her in tandem with the thumb rubbing circles over the fabric of her t-shirt and those two tiny movements combined are _thisclose_ to overwhelming. 

“Jesus Christ,” she says, and she’s not sure which of them broke away first but she’s got to remind herself that kissing Dan’s neck is _probably_ pushing things. Her brain - or her libido, she isn’t sure which - feels like a badly-trained dog on a too-short leash.

“Fuckin’ - _right_ ,” Arin says, and apparently he has none of the same pushing-things qualms as she does, because he’s pressing kisses against the back of Dan’s neck, moving to the side as best he can when Dan lets his head fall to one side. “Did you take fuckin’ kissing class in high school or something?” 

“No,” Dan says, a little bit distractedly, “I’m just an old man with lots of experience,” and Suzy kisses him on the mouth in the middle of the dreamy little giggle he lets out afterwards. It’s quick, and it’s short, but she’s the one to nip him that time and he lets out a deliberately even breath when she pulls away. 

“For the record,” he says, and there’s another little _mm_ in the middle of his sentence when Arin kisses his way up the arch of his neck to the shell of his ear, “this wasn’t what I - like - meant - I literally just meant can I kiss you, like, the once,” and it seems like maybe there’s going to be more, but Arin’s hand moves from where it had been resting on Dan’s ribs to rest low on his belly and Dan stops himself with a little shudder. 

_Hey,_ Arin murmurs, and it’s only because Suzy is so close that she hears it at all. She kisses him over Dan’s shoulder, quick and soft, feel the edge of Arin’s teeth on her lip before she pulls away. 

“Hey me or hey him?” She’s teasing a little, but he huffs out a laugh, nuzzles into the spot behind Dan’s ear. Dan shudders, the hand still on Suzy’s side twisting in the fabric of her shirt, but he’s smiling, too, tilting his head to the side to give Arin more access. 

“We’re gonna have to get better at that,” he says, but it’s faltering like he’s distracted. “Fuck, Arin.” 

“Hey, him,” Arin says, and Suzy can’t tell if he’s just barely biting Dan’s ear or if he’s running his teeth over it, but either way she can hear Dan’s breath catch. “You should turn around, I wanna make out.” 

“Oh my God,” Dan says, huffs out a laugh, “okay, Arin, let’s _make out_ ,” but he does turn around and as soon as he does Arin’s kissing him like he means it, the same hand wound in his hair again. Suzy drifts one hand up Dan’s back to join Arin’s, stroking her thumb over his knuckles. He’s pulling Dan’s hair, she realizes; he’s not yanking by any means but there’s definitely tension where he’s gripping a fistful and Dan certainly doesn’t seem to _mind_. 

Somewhere in there, Dan breaks the kiss to tip his head back and breathe _fuck_. Arin’s mouth is on his neck immediately, and even if Dan isn’t paying attention, Suzy is; he’s staying at the same spot for too long to be anything but purposeful, and Suzy knows he _shouldn’t_ leave a mark but the idea is immensely appealing - it’s under his collar, she reasons, he can cover it and it’ll still be there, and as she thinks it she watches Dan’s hand slide up Arin’s back, watches his long fingers lace in Arin’s hair and grip for a moment - not to pull his head away, she thinks, but the opposite, to keep him _there_. 

“Fuck,” he says suddenly, “fuck, I should go.”

Arin pulls away immediately, lets go of his grip on Dan’s hair, but he doesn’t let go of him altogether - his hands are on Dan’s hips, Suzy’s dropping to rest on his back. The expression on Arin’s face is somewhere between dropkicked puppy and active fire situation. “What? Why?” 

He could, Suzy thinks, possess slightly more chill, but if she's honest she's wondering the same thing herself. 

“I just,” Dan starts, and extracts himself from Arin’s lap, tugs at the hem of his shirt like it's going to do anything to distract from the obvious situation pressing at his zipper. Arin has a similar issue, just as if not more apparent. “Like, shit’s gonna go in a bedroom direction if I stay, and I super fucking love that idea right now but it's not - I don't wanna do something we're gonna regret tomorrow.” 

“We aren't gonna regret anything,” Suzy says, because she's never agreed with Dan more in her life than when he says _bedroom direction_. Dan’s got a blooming red mark underneath his left collarbone that she can’t stop staring at. 

“Yeah,” Dan says, “but still,” and he's _right_ , they both know it, but Arin still does what Suzy wants to do and lets his head thump back against the back of the couch. 

“You and your goddamn mature decisions,” he says to the ceiling. 

“Trust me, dude,” Dan says, “it’s hard for me too,” and lasts a respectable ten seconds or so before he laughs at his own joke. 

They walk him to the door - Arin struggles a little, has to unceremoniously shove his hand down the front of his pants to readjust himself, and Suzy knows her own face is flushed far pinker than she’d prefer - and before he opens it Dan kisses them both. She’s first, which she expects - Dan’s chivalrous like that - and it’s different kissing him standing up; she’s got to lean up on her toes, but both of his hands fit comfortably on her waist and it doesn’t feel like either of them particularly want it to end. 

He and Arin, she sees, have the same problem. Arin ends up backing him against the door, and she watches with her arms crossed over her belly, a grin playing around the edges of her mouth; it’s hot as fuck, the two of them, but it’s also sweet, in their weird way, and a little bit funny. Dan’s the one to put a stop to it, taking a shuddering breath when Arin starts to worry at his neck again, mumbling _fuck, Arin_. 

“Have a good night,” Arin murmurs into the hollow of his throat, kisses his way up the long arch of his neck, makes his way up to his mouth. “See you tomorrow.” He kisses Dan’s mouth, surprisingly gentle; Suzy slips in next to him, leans up to kiss him, too, soft.

“See you tomorrow,” Dan echoes faintly, and it’s only after that that he opens the door to leave.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This almost got uploaded on Friday. I have willpower!

They don’t have time for a repeat over the next week.

She sees Dan mostly in passing. There’s a staff meeting that Tuesday (he sits next to her like they’re in freshman homeroom, close enough that she can smell sandalwood and cinnamon the whole way through) and they Snapchat more than they ever have before (Dan, she discovers, mostly uses Snapchat to show people pretty things he encounters in the world, and also particularly fat vermin like pigeons and squirrels, and she's not sure why that surprises her but it charms her far more), but mostly Arin tells her how things are going. 

The first night he gets home from recording, he asks if she's okay with _stuff happening_ without her there, and she's got to actually think about it. “Yeah,” she says finally. “Especially if it's, like. Not to get too junior high on you, but if it's not serious, I’m fine with it? I kind of wanna be there for big stuff. At least the first time.” 

“Oh,” Arin says, “I just meant, like. I really wanted to kiss him after we finished up tonight, but then I thought. You know. We never talked about that?” 

“Oh,” Suzy echoes. “Shit. Yeah. No, that’s totally fine, babe.” 

Arin shrugs, but the careful way he’s watching her underscores that this is actually something to discuss. “It’s just probably worth talking about now,” he says, “so nobody’s feelings get hurt or anything later,” and she grins despite herself, snugs up against him to wrap both her arms around his waist. 

“You’re so sweet,” she says, nestles her forehead against his chest. He smells like himself - laundry detergent and faintly of his deodorant and cologne - but he smells a little like Danny, too, and she nuzzles in a little closer when she realizes that’s what that distinctly not-Arin scent is. She’d never noticed it before now. “Look at you, all thinking ahead and stuff.” 

“I wanna do this right,” he mumbles, presses a kiss against her hair. “For both of you.” He sounds uncharacteristically serious. He has so much love inside him, Suzy thinks suddenly, and she knows that that’s gotta be something Dan worries about - taking Arin’s affection or attention away from her - and she wishes there were a good way to explain it to him, that Arin could have a dozen partners and still have more than enough love left over. 

“And for you,” she says, and pulls away just far enough to kiss his lips. “We’re gonna do it right for you, too, Ar. This is all gonna go fine.”

* * *

She’s busy throughout the week, though, and there’s not much of a chance to do anything right for anyone where the three of them are concerned - this time of year, they’re trying to build up their buffer with one-offs, and she’s throwing herself into her shop. 

There are a couple of opportunities - mostly when Barry, through sheer dogged patience and insistence, gets Dan and Arin to actually leave the office for an hour and come get lunch somewhere that _isn’t_ the office kitchen. It finally actually works on Thursday, and they’re the last to show up, arriving together in an Uber to the pizza place Ross called dibs on.

Ryan, God bless him, is the last to notice and first to say something. “Dan,” he says around a mouthful of breadstick, “dude, is that Arin’s shirt?” 

Two weeks ago, Suzy thinks, they would have been - different. Draped all over each other as soon as someone said something, Arin’s hand wedged between Dan and the booth to grab his ass as obviously as possible, feeding each other bites of food in an over-the-top show of domesticity. Now, though, Dan just goes a little red. “Fuck off,” he says, “I was cold,” and slips into the booth next to Suzy, Arin close behind. 

It is Arin’s shirt, his purple-and-blue flannel, and he looks a little ridiculous and a lot cute; it hangs off of his sharp narrow shoulders and sort of puddles around him in the booth until he pulls it tighter around himself like it’s a cardigan. Arin’s in the t-shirt he wore underneath, looking inescapably smug. 

They order, after that, and talk amongst themselves, and Suzy can mostly keep track of the conversation but Dan’s leg is pressed against hers from knee to hip and it’s distracting as hell - she thinks, anyway, until she goes to look in her purse for her phone and sees that Arin’s hand is, under the table, resting on Dan’s skinny thigh. That, she realizes, is far more fucking distracting. 

She opens Snapchat while Matt and Barry debate the virtues of one program over another - it’s a familiar debate, she’s used to the cadence and the rhythm even if she isn’t used to the content - and opens her chat with Dan, tries to angle her phone so that he doesn’t see. _I like you in his clothes._

He jumps when his phone goes off. It’s in the pocket on Arin’s side. Suzy, for just a moment, wants to reach over and get it herself, just to see what he would do.

_he said the same thing,_ Dan says immediately. 

She’s firing back a reply before she can think to stop herself. _I bet I’d like you more out of them._

He reads her response, sets his phone face-down next to him - locks it, first, because Ross _will_ launch himself across the table to grab it if he thinks there’s something interesting on it, especially something that’s making him blush - and takes a long drink of his water. He stretches after that, leans in a little closer to her. “You are a devil woman,” he says once he’s close enough that he can say it without anyone else hearing, “just so you know,” and she - in response, out of retaliation, she doesn’t know - lays her hand on his other thigh for a moment, runs her nails over his bare skin where the knee of his jeans is ripped out. He shudders. 

_Mm-hmm,_ she hums cheerfully.

* * *

“Suze, hey,” Barry says, jogs a little to catch up to her. “Can we talk for a sec?” 

“Yeah, of course.” They’re the only ones in the hallway, and she just stops to let him catch up, doesn’t realize until he looks around that maybe he wants to talk privately. “What’s up?” 

“Can we go to my office?” Barry’s looking everywhere but at her. 

“Sure.” She makes a sort of _lead-the-way_ gesture, follows him as he heads to the end of the hall and turns. She thinks she knows what this is about, at least somewhat, and she’s proven right when Barry checks that the recording room is empty before he heads into the office. 

“Okay,” she says, and shuts the door behind her. Barry goes to his desk but doesn’t sit, shuffles papers around for a moment, pulls out his chair, pushes it back in. He ends up turning towards her with his hands shoved into his pockets, staring at the floor a couple feet in front of her shoes. “What’s up, Bear?” 

He takes a while to answer, chewing on his bottom lip. “I don’t wanna start anything,” he says finally. “Like - I’m not trying to. You know. Start shit or cause problems or whatever. I don’t even know if I should say anything.” 

She waits for a few seconds, then says, gently, “You can tell me anything. Okay? You’re not starting shit, I promise.” 

“Have you, like,” he starts, and stops to fidget a little more. He looks miserable. He looks like he’s fucking _torturing_ himself. Suzy wants to put him out of his misery and tell him everything’s fine, that she knows everything, but she knows him too well to think that would work; he’d think she didn’t understand what he meant, or that he misunderstood what was going on in the first place, and then when he _really_ got it, he’d have the same crisis all over again. “Have you noticed anything weird with Arin and Danny?” 

She smiles, and doesn’t really mean to, but there’s no stopping it once it starts. “Yeah, Bear,” she says, and his head snaps up to look at her like he thinks maybe he didn’t hear her right. “They’re not exactly being subtle.” 

“So, like,” he says. She can hear him swallow. He looks a little bamboozled. “You know? And you’re - what, like. You’re cool with it?” 

_I’m more than cool with it,_ she wants to say, _I am super, extra, intensely more than cool with it,_ but doesn’t, just relaxes a little where she’s leaning one hip against the door. “It’s not just them,” she says, settles with that after running through the other options - the realistic ones - in her head. “It’s - we talked about it. It’s been a really long time coming.” 

“Yeah,” Barry says faintly. “Jesus, Suze, I thought Arin was having a fuckin’ _affair_. Like - I straight up thought he was cheating on you.” 

She has to think about that for a second. She wants to say - right away, right off the bat - that Barry’s sweet, and that she appreciates it, but that everything’s fine - but that isn’t fair, not really. She can’t minimize it like that. Suddenly, the humor in the situation is lessened somewhat; Barry looks a little drained, and a lot like he doesn’t think it’s funny. 

“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “We talked about what to do - like, here in the office? And we figured we could just confirm it when people asked, but we didn’t think about you. You’re around us all the time, of course you’d notice, we should have just told you outright.” 

Barry does sit down, then, and goes for his papers again, shuffles them nervously for want of something to do with his hands. Suzy watches him carefully, suddenly feeling more than a little guilty. 

“So it’s,” he says, and clears his throat. “It’s, like.” 

“All of us,” she says, because she’s pretty sure that’s what he’s asking. “It’s like - it’s a _thing_. With all three of us. We haven’t told anybody else yet.” 

“Were you gonna tell us?” He looks at her, then, and he doesn’t look _hurt_ but he does look like he’s expecting an answer he doesn’t really want. “Me and Ross.” 

“We talked about it,” she says, and feels a little bit like she’s hedging. “If one of you asked - you guys, or Matt and Ryan or Vernon - we would be honest. That’s what we decided.” It’s her turn to fidget, now. Barry has a remarkably good dad stare when he tries. It’s uncannily similar to the one that Brian fixes them with when they’re behaving in a way that he deems unnecessarily dramatic. 

“Okay,” he says. “I’m - I’m not trying to be an asshole, here.”

“I don’t think you’re being an asshole,” Suzy says, in a slightly smaller voice than she really intended. “I think I kind of feel like an asshole now, though.” 

“I don’t want to say you should,” Barry says, “but you maybe should, a little,” and smiles at her, and fuck, at least he isn’t _mad_. It’s the fucking worst when Barry’s mad at them, because it’s always for a good reason, and he’s always right. And he’s never even an asshole about it, never holds it over their heads or whatever, just rolls with it when they say sorry and moves on. He’s the best and it’s kind of the worst sometimes. “And you should probably tell _those_ two assholes to knock it off before Ross has a conniption fit at me about the company going under because Arin can’t keep his dick in his pants, because that’s what I was thinking, and Ross is a billion times more fuckin’ dramatic than me.” 

“Yeah,” she says, and then “fuck, Barry, I’m sorry.” She's suddenly thinking about how she would feel if something like this happened with a different set of people in some parallel universe - if Dan and Barry got together and kept it a secret, or something. “It's not that we didn't - like - didn't trust you.” 

“I know, Suze.” He shrugs one shoulder, grins his familiar small disarming Barry grin, but it fades after a moment. “Do you have, like. A crisis plan worked out? In case something leaks, or whatever.”

She hadn't thought about that. “No,” she admits. “We should talk about it.”

“You should talk to Brian about it,” Barry says. “I would guess Danny already told him, and he's good at shit like this. He's practical.”

Suzy can't think of anyone, other than her parents, that she'd rather tell about this less than Brian. He's defensive of Dan in a way that no one else really is, but he knows Dan the best out of all of them - better than Arin, even, who spends more time with him than with his own wife, and better than Barry, who lives with him. She hadn't thought about needing Brian’s input or approval quite yet - 

Then again, Barry thinks he already knows, which means that Dan must have talked to him, and that Brian didn't tell him it was a terrible idea, so. 

“Yeah,” she says. Barry’s watching her think. “That's not a bad idea.” 

“That's my advice for today,” Barry says. “That, and tell Ross before he figures out that he's not imagining things, because he's gonna freak the fuck out.” And then, “And, like. Tell Arin to fuckin’ knock it off with the hickies, ‘cause I assume that wasn't you.”

She can feel herself blushing and determinedly does not say _not yet_. “I’m a lady,” she says instead, like that's explanation enough. And she could leave it there - leave it on a cheerful note, something funny - but she doesn't, can't, almost. 

“Thank you,” she says quietly, after a little stretch of silence. “This could have gone, like. Really badly. I’m glad you asked me.”

“Me, too,” Barry says, “because I thought about just punching Arin in the dick, honestly.”

“Please don't do that,” she says, “you'd make two people sad now instead of just one,” and then “Jesus Christ, I have to go before you learn anything else about my sex life,” and Barry only looks genuinely scandalized for a moment before he starts to laugh. 

“Okay,” he says, “no dick punching yet. Let me know how it goes with Ross.” 

She nods, and before Barry can say anything else she's leaning down to hug him, both arms around his shoulders. He hugs back reflexively, warm and steady and solid. 

“Thanks,” she says again, mostly into his shoulder. He runs his hand up and down her back a couple of times before she pulls away. 

“You know it,” he says, and coming from someone else it might sound weird or out of place, but she _does_ know it, exactly what it is, exactly what he's talking about. He's stable and reliable and honest, all the things she's thanking him for. And she knows it. 

Worse people could have figured it out first, she thinks, and shuts the door behind her on her way out.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends! Sorry about the super late update, I had some real weird personal life/career shit happen this week that sort of impacted the whole "writing for pleasure" thing. Luckily that's all sorted out and things should be back to normal regarding updates now. Anyway, have another extra-long chapter! It's pretty light in terms of plot but there's a lot of porn, so... you're welcome? 
> 
> Note: this chapter gets _pretty_ explicit towards the middle, so if you're not interested in that, probably skip about halfway through! (Also, this is probably no longer the fic for you if you don't want to read explicit things.) Also please note the new/replaced tag for **under-negotiated kink** , which is really more like non-negotiated kink in this context; there are also some unsafe D/s practices at play here, so if that's something that bothers you, feel free to skip the last half of this one!

For a little while, she thinks she should tell them right then. She knows it would ruin the rest of their day, though - not because they'd be upset, but because they'd be distracted; they'd end up either not recording or scrapping whatever they came out with, too busy determinedly not talking about what they're thinking to actually talk about something entertaining. 

She ends up texting two people: Barry first, with _don't say anything to anybody yet, ok?_ and then _that means Ross, too_ , then Arin, with _ask him to come over tomorrow night. Dinner or something?_

They both, unsurprisingly, answer with _ok_. Arin, at least, follows up with _he wants to know if tonight is ok_ an hour later. She wonders if she'll be featured in that episode: _shit, my wife is texting me -_ _Oh, what a pain in the ass, you poor thing, your wonderful wife daring to text you._

She says _sure_ back, sits at her desk fucking twiddling her thumbs until he replies again, says they'll be done around nine, is that too late. It's not, of course, they've all managed to fuck their sleep schedules up nicely by now, but she just says _no that's totally fine_ and closes down her computer. 

It is. It's fine. It's totally fine. This is all going to be totally fine.

* * *

They don't get home until closer to ten and Suzy's glad she decided that afternoon to do a stir-fry instead of anything that actually took accurate timing. By the time they're actually settled in - Arin changed into joggers and one of his rattier t-shirts, Dan curled up in one of the kitchen chairs with both cats wedged and wriggled into his lap - she's almost done, spooning vegetables over piles of rice noodles. 

And she doesn't want to interrupt their dinner, so she waits until they're mostly done - it takes a while, between Dan's little mincing bites and Arin taking breaks every thirty seconds to talk, but they get there, and that's when she sits back in her chair. 

"So," she says, and goes for it. "Barry knows." 

Neither of them say anything for a moment. Dan's eyes are huge in his skinny face, and Arin's looking at her like he's not a hundred percent sure what she just said - he's the first one to talk, though, because of course he is. "How?" 

She shrugs. It's nicer than saying _because you're the most unsubtle people on the planet, and Danny's covered in hickies all the fucking time._ "He guessed," she says instead, and can't help herself from adding, in a more gentle tone than she really intends, "you're not super subtle." 

“Does Ross know?” That’s Dan asking the real questions, cutting down to the quick of it; if Ross knows, everybody knows. He’d never do it maliciously - their Ross-hatred is just a bit for the show, albeit one that plays impossibly well, but he’s one of Arin’s best friends and Suzy would bet money against him doing something to willingly hurt any of them. That doesn’t mean he’d never do it. 

“Barry says no,” she says, “and I don’t think he was lying.” 

The relief is palpable. They can handle it getting out if they can control how or when; they can’t really handle it leaking, especially this soon, and she knows that none of them know what they’d do if it was one of their friends that leaked it, intentionally or not. Dan resumes petting Mochi top-to-tail; his hand had stilled while he listened to her. 

“He said he thought you told Brian,” she says then, even though something in the back of her head tells her not to - she should, she thinks, give them this small victory, but. 

“Oh,” Dan says after a moment, but doesn’t deny it. 

“Do you think Brian would have told him?” Arin asks, but they all know the answer. Brian and Barry aren’t especially close, and Suzy’s pretty sure that Brian would rather swallow his tongue than repeat something that Danny told him in confidence. 

“No,” Dan says immediately. He sounds immensely certain. “No way.” 

“It’s not,” she starts, breaks the little bit of silence that stretches between them after that, “like - it isn’t a huge deal, I think. It’s just Barry. You know?” She’s glad she’s talking to them and doesn’t have to make a ton of sense. They tend to all understand what the other is talking about without much preamble or explanation. 

“Yeah,” Arin says, and pushes the last little bit of green bean around on his plate. 

Suzy fidgets a little as though in response, like one of them yawned and she had to, too, a goofy call-and-response. “I feel bad that we didn’t tell him before,” she admits after a couple of moments. “Like. I thought about how I’d feel if - like - Danny and Barry got together and didn’t tell us, or something.” 

“Yeah,” Arin says again, and Dan nods, and neither of them say anything after that for a little while. Mimi is making happy little _prrp_ noises, flopping over onto her side in Dan’s lap while he tickles her belly. 

“I only,” Dan says finally, and clears his throat. “I needed to get Brian’s advice. Back when you first brought this up. I didn’t know what to do.” He shrugs one shoulder, eyes mostly on the cats. “I didn’t - I wasn’t trying to just, like. Blast everything all over the place.” 

Arin reaches to rub his hand over Dan’s back. Suzy, for just a moment, is distracted by the muscles flexing in his forearm. She wonders if Dan ever deals with that while they’re recording - she knows well what it’s like to be around Arin all the time, how attractive the dumbest, simplest shit seems when it’s him doing it. She can’t imagine it’s avoidable. “Apparently he gives good advice,” he says, and that, at least, makes Dan smile. 

“It’s paid off so far,” he says. 

There’s another pause, a little more restful than the one before, and then Suzy has to ask - she’s surprised Arin doesn’t get there before she does. “Was Brian, like. Cool with it?” 

Dan leans infinitesimally into the hand Arin’s got on his back and makes a noncommittal little _mm_ noise. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. He sounds like he had to think about it. “He’s kind of old-fashioned, you know? He wanted me to be sure.” 

He’s not wrong. Brian, despite his being half of a band that revolves around dick jokes and allusions to three-and-moresomes, is curiously traditional about things like marriage and sex; Suzy can’t imagine that he loved the idea of Dan being the third in a menage-a-trois with them. 

“He’s probably gonna talk to you,” Dan says to Arin, and Arin looks at her just after, a little wide-eyed. 

“Oh,” he says. “Cool. Sounds good.” 

Dan scoots his chair over to lay his head on Arin’s shoulder. Mochi squeaks in disapproval and leaps to the floor, but Mimi digs her claws into his jeans and stubbornly remains. “He’s gonna give you a shovel talk,” he says, like that’s going to make Arin feel better, “that’s all,” and Suzy knows she’s grinning like an asshole when Arin looks at her again but she can’t help herself. 

“Oh,” Arin repeats, with the faintest air of hysteria. “Oh, okay. Sounds good. Love it.” 

“I like that I don’t warrant a shovel talk,” Suzy says, and stands up to collect their plates. “Brian knows that I’m the nice one.” 

They bicker a little back and forth - fondly, with Arin insisting that she's secretly cruel and Dan backing him up by telling about her little stunt at the diner; her retort is natural, though - "Arin was feeling you up, I just thought I should get a turn, too." 

"He was into it," Arin says immediately, and Dan laughs but it sounds just a touch embarrassed. 

"Fuck off," he says, "guess who has two thumbs and is _never_ telling you his fuckin' kinky secrets ever again?" 

Arin makes a little _mm_ noise and kisses the side of his head. "I don't know," he says, "but probably not you," and Danny says _motherfucker_ under his breath but still leans into the contact a little. 

Suzy's watching, but she's a little distracted, too; Arin hadn't shared what Dan refers to as his _kinky secrets_ , and she wonders if she'll be made to uncover them herself. Apparently one is public sex - public something-or-other, at least, because even the most Puritan of Puritans wouldn't consider Arin's hand resting a little too high on Dan's leg _sex_ , but. That's good information to have. 

"Let's go watch something," she says, instead of any of that. "Dan, have you seen _Frozen Planet_ yet?"

"No," he says, and straightens up, and stretches, and she and Arin both stare while he does. "The last nature thing I watched was _Blackfish_ with Barry and it made me cry, so. You know. Not the best track record." 

Arin laughs and kisses him again but this time it's on the mouth, and this time it's slower and sweeter, more deliberate than the casual hair-kiss moments ago. “You’re the nicest person I know,” he says, and it’s clearly supposed to be part of the bit, but he sounds sincere enough that Dan goes a little bit pink in the face and stands up. The thing is, Suzy thinks, even if it’s part of the bit it’s kind of _not_ at the same time - Dan _is_ the nicest person Arin knows, and the nicest person she knows. That he would cry over the fate of a captive orca is possibly one of the least surprising things she could learn about him. 

“Well,” she says, “there’s nothing horribly depressing in this, I’m pretty sure.” 

“Oh, good.” Dan stretches again and there’s the distinct sound of a couple vertebrae popping. His jacket is laying over the back of his chair, and the t-shirt he’s wearing is old and soft and thin and rides up almost to his ribs when he stretches his whole body out like a cat. 

The manscaping joke from a couple of years ago, Suzy thinks, may not have been much of a joke. She's seized with the absurd urge to tell Dan how pretty he is but restrains herself, settling instead on letting her hand rest low on his back while they go into the living room; something in her finds itself very satisfied by little gestures like that, getting to do things that might be considered otherwise masculine. Arin likes it, too, but it's a little bit of a power struggle sometimes, and not always in a sexy way; she doesn't think they'll have a similar issue with Dan. 

Arin follows on the other side, drifts his hand over the back of hers, just barely runs his fingertips over her skin - intentional, definitely, but faux-casual, too, like he’s playing at not taking it seriously. That tells her something about what _he’s_ thinking. 

They settle on the couch like they had before - Arin-Dan-Suzy, with Dan’s head on Suzy’s shoulder and Arin’s arm around his waist. Netflix doesn’t seem to want to load, and Arin’s hand starts moving slow on Dan’s side in the meantime, fingers curling around towards his hip; Suzy can feel him moving and grins a little to herself, looks over the top of Dan’s head to catch Arin’s eye. He grins at her, too, a little slower and a little darker than her own. 

Okay, she thinks, and swallows. Okay. She knows what he’s thinking. 

They get about fifteen minutes into the first episode of _Frozen Planet_ when Arin makes his move. It’s not an especially well-planned one - he didn’t spend the prior fifteen minutes coming up with it - because it’s just _hey_ and kissing him when Dan looks up. Suzy’s tempted to just turn the TV off when she realizes that’s the game plan. 

“Fuck,” Dan says, laughs against Arin’s mouth, “are you turned on by penguins, you fuckin’ weirdo?” 

“Mm,” Arin says, like that’s an answer, and then manages “huh-uh - just you,” and Suzy has to hand it to him, that’s _pretty fucking smooth_. Dan’s turned towards him and she takes the opportunity to get one hand up into the thick of his hair, lacing her fingers in it and tugging gently for a moment; he makes a shuddery little noise into the kiss, makes another, a little bit louder, when she starts dotting kisses up the back of his neck.

“Jesus Christ,” Dan says - after what feels like _a while_ and is probably only about thirty seconds - “you’re gonna melt my fuckin’ brain,” and Arin’s the one to murmur _focus, baby_ but Suzy’s the one thinking it. She’s not sure when the pet names became a thing - they hadn’t discussed it - but she can’t say that she minds. It’s - it’s something, hearing Arin rumble that. 

And the thing is, Dan _does_. He seems to settle, almost, the shoulder under Suzy’s hand relaxing a touch. 

_Oh,_ Suzy thinks, and files that away.

She doesn’t say anything aloud, though, not for a while; the hand in Dan’s hair slides down his back to ease under his shirt a little ways, nails digging lightly at the soft skin of his back and dragging down. He arches forward into Arin’s hands the second time she does it - she manages to get right over his spine and he makes a surprised little noise - and she’s pretty sure she hears Arin laugh. 

“Stay still,” she says, quiet, and kisses Arin on the mouth as soon as he’s close enough that she can. She can hear Dan’s breathing. It’s shockingly hot. 

“Fuck,” he says eventually - just kind of breathes it, head tipped back. 

_Mm-hmm,_ she hums agreeably, and gets her hand in his hair again, eases him around so that she can kiss him, this time, instead of Arin. When they’re done Arin’s just _watching_ , pupils blown wide. 

“You should come here,” he says, and scoots away from the arm of the couch a little - to make room, she thinks, and Dan only seems confused for a moment before he’s saying _oh_ , just barely breathing it, and then he climbs into Arin’s lap like he’s told, swings one leg over his thighs and settles in.

“My goodness,” Suzy says faintly, and immediately moves over so that she’s pressed up against Arin, can feel his heat and weight all up the length of her side. Dan looks a little bit bashful - like he’s hoping that that’s what Arin actually meant - and Arin leans forward to kiss him almost immediately, both hands on Dan’s ass like he’s trying to keep him stable. Suzy’s pretty sure that Dan’s got enough core strength to make that unnecessary, but she can’t _blame_ him. 

“Suze,” Dan says after a few moments - after Arin’s broken that kiss and has started in on his neck again, “Suze, c’mere,” and fuck, she loves kissing him, she feels like she forgot sometime over the last two or three minutes how much she loves kissing him. He bites her bottom lip halfway through - nips, not bites, he’s careful about it but it still makes her make a little noise down in her throat that he echoes. 

Somewhere along the line, she does end up turning the TV off, and then it’s just the one lamp in the corner that shows what any of them are doing. Arin’s hands are tight on Dan’s ass, gripping hard - one, at least, the other is up the back of his shirt, the side, roaming over his ribs. Suzy holds his head back once, although she’s sure she doesn’t need to; Arin wants room to work on his neck, and her hand in his hair is just a little more attention that Dan won’t argue with. 

“Hey,” Dan says, and she only knows that some time has passed because he sounds a little bit wrecked, and when she looks at him his bottom lip is swollen. Arin’s got him pulled up flush against him, legs spread a little. “Can I - ?” He’s got one hand on Arin’s chest, flat, like he’s not sure where else it can go, but the other is sliding down Arin’s belly, making its way down to the waist of his pants. 

“Oh,” Arin says, “fuck,” and his own hand moves down to meet Dan’s before he seems to remember that she’s there. They both look at her just a little beseechingly and she can’t stop the slow grin that spreads across her face, can’t avoid biting her bottom lip. 

She looks at Danny. “Yeah,” she says, and it comes out a little lower than she means for it to, “yeah, sweetheart, if Arin says so,” and the breath Dan lets out is, she thinks, deliberately measured. 

“Arin?” he says, and one of Arin’s hands moves up to tangle itself in his hair, draws him down for a deeper kiss than she figures he probably intended - they’re both hard, visibly so, and Dan seems to be holding himself still, from what she can see, avoiding what she figures is the instinctive urge to grind down against what he can surely feel underneath him. Both of Arin’s hands are still gripping his ass hard enough that Suzy can see the effort in the back of his hands. 

“Yeah - yeah, fuck, whatever you want,” Arin says, lets his head fall back against the couch, and it’s clearly just supposed to be so that he can let a breath out but Dan takes the opportunity to start pressing kisses under the shelf of his jaw, down the column of his neck - he bites him once, at least, because Suzy hears the little hiss of breath when Arin inhales. 

“I really wanna blow you,” Dan says, mostly into Arin’s neck, just loudly enough for both of them to hear.

“ _Oh_ ,” Suzy says, and doesn’t really mean to, but. 

“Yes,” Arin says almost at the same time, “yes, yeah, fuckin’ - yes, absolutely,” and gets one hand up in Dan’s hair again, tugs him up for a kiss. Dan seems a little more pliant than before; the hand that had been on Arin’s chest moved up to his shoulder while the other seems - from what Suzy can see - to have slid down into the front of his pants. 

“Arin,” Suzy says, crosses her legs at the knee, acutely aware of the heat in her face, “you should stand up - he’s too tall to do anything if you’re sitting down.” She sounds exceptionally casual to her own ears, like she’s talking about how it’s nice outside tonight, or that it’s a crescent moon. “Danny, right here’s good.” 

She gestures to the spot on the carpet right by her feet, and tries not to think about how good that sounds to the small savage thing in her chest that wants him there all the time. 

He moves quicker than Arin does, takes his place right where she’d said, and her hand is moving through his hair almost immediately, long fingers carding through his mess of thick curls, working carefully through snags and knots and skating around them when they’re too tough. Arin takes a little bit longer but gets to his feet eventually, right in front of him - then takes a couple of steps back so that he can lean the backs of his shoulders against the wall, motions for Dan to follow. He does, shuffles forward on his knees, and Suzy’s only seeing it out of her peripherals, too busy watching Arin’s face. Her husband looks fucking enraptured. 

Dan doesn’t fuck around. She’s kind of expecting Arin to be the one to make the first move - well, the first move in this context - but Dan’s the one that reaches for the drawstring on his pants, loosens it enough that he can tug them and his boxers down in one motion. Arin’s hands are flat against the wall, fingers curling up into his palms. 

“Fuck,” Dan says, soft, and wraps one hand around him and then the other a little hesitantly, and Suzy laughs at him - only a little, and fondly. 

“I know, right,” she says, and slides her hand down to the side of Dan’s neck, runs her fingertips gently over the spot under his jaw where his pulse is thrumming. 

“You coulda warned a guy,” he says, but it sounds a little distant, like he’s not really thinking about what he’s saying - he’s quieter than she’s expecting, not nearly as mouthy as Arin would be if their positions were exchanged, but he’s _visibly_ still into it, so maybe he’s just - focused, she thinks. 

“Element of surprise,” Arin says, and stills his hips where he’d let them arch forward. Dan’s moving his hands, jerking him slow with one and rubbing his thumb over the head with the other, like he’s mapping out what he’s going to be working with. He looks like he’s concentrating and Suzy would think it was cute as hell if he didn’t have her husband’s dick in his hands. As it is, it’s just hot. 

“I don’t know,” Suzy says, and she knows she sounds like she’s teasing but she isn’t meaning to. Arin’s - a lot, sometimes, is all, in a literal sense like now and in a more abstract way too. She’s carding her fingers gently through Dan’s hair again. He seems to like it - she knows he likes having his hair played with, and she’s caught him closing his eyes a couple of times just tonight when she’s really dedicated herself to it. “If he’s never done this before, you might not be the best, like - trial run.” 

“Fuck,” Arin says, and opens his eyes. “That’s. I didn’t think about that.” Dan rubs his thumb underneath the head and over the tip again and Arin has to audibly bite back a moan. “This is probably not - not an awesome idea.” 

“Wait,” Danny says, sits back a little more comfortably on his knees. His pupils are gigantic when Suzy meets his eyes, irises only barely visible in razor-thin rings. “I can do it, Suze. I’ve done it before.” 

Above him, Arin chokes. 

“Oh,” Suzy says, and feels something warm start high in her chest and sink all the way down to the bottom of her belly. A grin curls across her face, lazy and pleased, before she can think to stop it, to play it cool even a little bit. She reaches out with one hand, laces her fingers gently in Dan’s hair, tugs hard - just a little - before it morphs itself into a pet; Dan’s eyes close for a moment longer than a blink, long lashes fanned out over his cheekbones, before he opens them again. “Have you, now.” 

Dan nods, swallows so hard she can hear it. “Please?”

“Suze,” Arin says, and when she looks up, he looks like he’s maybe about to say _please_ too. 

“By all means,” she says, and scoots forward on the couch until she’s only just barely sitting on the edge. She wants a front-row view of this. 

Like before, Dan doesn’t waste time. He leans forward again and takes Arin in his mouth, doesn’t bother with exploratory licks or kisses - maybe that’ll come later, she thinks, Dan seems like he would be as interested in teasing as she is sometimes, and that makes her think about both of them teaming up to take Arin on someday, and _fuck_ , that’s an idea - just wraps his lips around the head and sinks down. 

“Jesus Christ,” Arin says, and they both look up at him. Dan doesn’t stop when she does, though - he’s looking up at Arin while he starts whatever rhythm he can manage, and Suzy murmurs _Arin, hey - look at him_ with her hand still tangled in Dan’s hair. 

Arin does, although it takes him a moment - his head’s tipped back against the wall and his eyes are closed, but as soon as he looks down he seems almost captivated. “Fuck,” he says, “look at you,” and one of his hands joins Suzy’s for a moment before he runs his thumb over Dan’s cheekbone. “You’re so fucking pretty, Jesus.” 

Dan hums a little and closes his eyes. He looks impossibly pleased with a dick in his mouth and two different peoples’ hands in his hair. 

Arin keeps up a steady stream for the most part - _you’re doing so good, baby, you take dick so pretty,_ and she wonders if Dan expected that from him - Arin’s good at that shit when he puts his mind to it, has left her some voicemails that would be extraordinarily embarrassing if leaked when he’s been on international trips and found himself missing his wife in his lonely hotel room - but Dan himself is quiet, offering only little hums in response once in a while - she checks in once, murmurs _you doing okay?_ and gets an immediate _mm-hm_ back. 

“Hey,” she says, quiet, and he looks up at her. “Don’t use your hands, baby. Put ‘em on your thighs.” 

He puts both hands palm-down flat on his thighs immediately, resituates himself accordingly - has to shift forward, get a little closer. Arin moans low in his throat up above them, the hand in Danny’s hair tightening and not releasing its grip for a good thirty seconds. It’s only after that that Dan pulls off, panting for breath.

“You can pull,” he says to no one in particular, and he sounds like a fucking disaster already, gravelly and sore and hot as hell, “if you wanna,” and gets back to it, and they both seem to take him up on it at the same time, Suzy’s hand tightening around the handful of hair she’s got and Arin’s threading through from the crown to find a handful and _tug_. Arin’s not able to stop his hips from moving anymore, it seems like, and she’s not sure if she’s holding Dan’s head still or if Arin is while he thrusts forward - shallowly, at least, but they’re still distinct motions. Dan doesn’t seem to mind at all. She hasn’t even heard him gag. 

As soon as that thought occurs to her, she’s leaning down to murmur in his ear, close enough that she knows he can feel it. “Do you think you can take more?” 

_Mm-hm,_ he hums immediately, and there’s another little hum-moan when she kisses his temple, sweet and soft. 

“Good,” she says, straightens up, and then, before she can think too hard about it, “good boy,” and when Dan’s eyes close at that, they don’t open again for a long while, but she can see a tiny grin for just a moment before seems to concentrate again on the task at hand - or at mouth, whatever the case may be. There’s another couple of inches that he doesn’t seem to be able to take, and she tightens her fingers a little, guides him towards Arin, keeps her hand firm. 

He does choke, then, just a little, and she doesn’t mean to smile at that but she does. It’s good to know that he’s not _actually_ perfect at this. “Stretch your jaw,” she says, “and try to open your throat and breathe out through your nose at the same time. Can you do that?” 

_Mm-hm._ Dan sinks forward a little further, even though it takes him a moment. She’s not sure if he’s struggling or steeling himself. 

“Suze,” Arin says, watching - he sounds a little concerned, almost, but Dan makes a little moaning noise low in his throat that seems to convince Arin that everything’s fine, because he doesn’t say anything but _fuck_ after that. 

“That’s good,” Suzy murmurs, “you’re perfect, baby, you’re doing so good,” and Arin pets over her hand, gets to the back of Danny’s hair to scritch gently at the nape of his neck. It’s a little while then until Dan manages all of it, presses his nose to Arin’s belly, but Arin’s making tiny helpless noises above them and gripping a handful of Dan’s hair with white-knuckled strength, hips canting forward in the same shallow little thrusts as before, and it occurs to her somewhere along the way that Dan’s sort of getting facefucked and doesn’t even seem to mind. 

“Shit,” Arin pants finally - finally, it feels like forever but she’d bet that it’s only been about ten minutes - “fuck, ’m gonna come,” and Suzy releases the grip she’s got on Dan’s hair, a little belatedly; he hasn’t needed it for the last couple of minutes, more than capable of handling this himself. She’s left little crescents in her palm from her nails. 

She leans down again to speak in Danny’s ear, lips brushing the shell. “He’s gonna come,” she murmurs, presses a kiss against his hair. “Can he come in your mouth? He likes that. Or he can come on your face, or - wherever you want.” 

Dan hums his assent and she kisses him again, right at his temple. “Yeah, he can come in your mouth?” Another hum, quieter. She straightens up and smooths her hand affectionately over Dan’s hair and beams up at her husband, extraordinarily self-satisfied. “Hear that, babe?”

“Yeah,” Arin says, and has the touch of desperation that she associates with being close to coming. “Fuck, I’ve been thinking about that for _forever_ , Jesus Christ.” 

Dan makes a tiny noise. Suzy can see him digging his fingertips into his thighs. He looks torturously hard, and she wonders distantly who he wants to take care of that when he’s done with this - she figures Arin, but maybe they can trade off. 

It doesn’t take Arin long after that. He makes a gut-punched noise and his hips finally still, and Danny sits there pretty and patient on his knees until Arin pulls out, and from what she can see - and she watches, hot all over and biting down on her bottom lip so hard she thinks it might bruise in the morning - swallows him through it, looks up at Arin and pants a little bit for breath through bruised lips. He looks wrecked, she thinks, and notices that his hands are still on his thighs. 

Arin starts to pull himself together, runs his hand over Dan’s hair one more time before he gets his pants and boxers back up where they’re supposed to be and starts to re-tie the drawstring with fingers that shake just a little. Dan stays where he is but tips his head against her knee, careful, moving slow like he’s not sure she’s going to stay still long enough for him to do it. She can feel his breath on her knee, rabbit-fast. 

“Danny,” she says, and Arin sits on the other side of her, close. “Come up here.” 

He does, but it takes him a few seconds. He’s shaky once he’s standing. She can see his legs trembling. 

“C’mere,” Arin repeats, motions to his lap, and as soon as Dan’s situated himself - it’s quick, he doesn’t hesitate at all, and she wonders if he was hoping Arin would say that - Arin kisses him, deep and soft. 

“You’re gonna be a mess tomorrow,” he says, once it’s broken. Suzy’s running one hand up and down Dan’s back, scritching her nails over his shoulders on every upstroke. Dan makes a little noise in agreement, nestles his forehead in against Arin’s shoulder. “Can I touch you?” Arin says after a few moments, and Suzy sees that he has one hand resting low on Dan’s belly, right above his belt buckle. 

“Yeah,” Dan murmurs, and it’s the first actual word she thinks she’s heard him say in about fifteen minutes. 

Arin’s quick about it after that, sets both hands to work on the buckle and then on his jeans - “of course you wear button-fly jeans tonight” - and works his jeans and tight little boxer-briefs down just enough that he can get his hand around Dan’s dick. 

“Fuck,” Dan says, like he’s surprised. When Suzy murmurs _hey_ , he looks at her, and when she kisses him he kisses her back, but he’s distracted, makes a tiny whining noise against her mouth. She trails kisses down to his neck instead, sees Arin, out of the corner of her eye, bring his hand up to lick it and then reach back down to grasp him again. 

She doesn’t think it’ll take long, and she’s right. “Fuck,” Dan says again, quieter, a little bit desperate. “Arin, fuck,” and Arin bites the other side of his neck, right under his jaw, like that’s a response. 

“Are you gonna come?” His other hand is gripping Dan’s ass, hard. “C’mon, baby, I wanna hear what you sound like when you come.” It’s so fucking _conversational_ that it would be absurd under any other circumstances but Dan manages a little breathless _yeah_ and jerks his hips once before he seems to still himself, to just give himself over to what Arin’s doing. 

He comes not a minute after that, and he’s quiet about it, mumbles _Arin_ , and it’s only when Arin reaches to wipe his hand off on his own shirt that Suzy sees the marks on his forearm where Danny must have been digging his nails in. 

“Jesus,” Dan says faintly, after - she doesn’t know how much time passes. “Fuck, I feel drunk.” 

“You kinda seem drunk,” Suzy says, and presses a kiss against his shoulder. “And thirsty. Do you need water?” 

“That would be,” Dan starts, and falters. He’s nestled up on Arin’s shoulder again. “Amazing.”

She stands to head to the kitchen, presses her cool wrist against her burning forehead. She’s going to say she’s good if either of them offer, she’s decided; it’s partially that she doesn’t want to overwhelm Danny with both of them at once, or both of them in very short sequence, and partially that she’s only half sure she won’t go back in there to find both of them asleep. She takes her time in the kitchen, too, drinks a full glass herself and makes one for Arin, and when she gets into the living room, Arin’s got both arms around a re-dressed and apparently asleep Dan. 

“I think he conked out,” Arin says quietly, and sounds _incredibly_ fond. 

“Huh-uh,” Dan says, and sounds approximately ten percent awake. 

“I don’t know if I can carry a hundred and fifty pounds of deadweight up the stairs,” Arin murmurs, and kisses the side of Dan’s head, “so you might have to sleep on the couch.” 

“Hunnerd an’ forty,” Dan mumbles, “doctor yelled at me last week.” 

“Still,” Arin says. “Suze, are the cats gonna knock that over if we just leave the water on the table?” 

“Nah,” Suzy says, and motions for Arin to stand up. He can hold Dan for the couple of minutes it takes her to get the couch made up, and Dan’s fully koalaed onto him by the time she spreads the biggest throw out as a bottom sheet. She’s a little surprised by how tired Dan seems so quickly, but - that was kind of intense, and maybe he had a long day, anyway, and she mostly puts it out of mind by the time Arin deposits him back on the couch. 

They watch him for a moment. Arin’s got one arm around her waist, big hand spread over her hip. Dan’s breathing evens out after what feels like no time at all; he’s legitimately, genuinely asleep. 

“I think that went well,” she murmurs. Arin kisses her temple and hums his agreement.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a much shorter chapter than the last, but if I included what the end of the chapter is leading to, it would be probably the same length as the last, and that is too many words! Also, I'm going to try my very best to get a backlog of chapters ready again, so bear with me.
> 
> (And [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtlgYxa6BMU) the chapter soundtrack, or at least the soundtrack for their talk.)

When Suzy wakes up in the morning, Dan’s gone.

There’s a note on the back of a receipt on the coffee table, Dan’s tight frenetic handwriting in one of Arin’s Prismacolor brushes, the dark violet: _Phone died, getting a cab home. Love you -D_. 

He signed it ‘love’, she thinks, and takes a breath. It’s not the first time, or even the fiftieth time; long before they started whatever this is, Dan signed off on phone calls with _love you_ to both her and Arin (and Barry, and Brian), easy and casual, because, he said, he _does_ , it doesn’t have to be romantic to be love. He signed it ‘love’, and she feels like that should make up for the abruptness, but.

He’s spent the night with them before, a hundred times split more or less evenly between their couch and their guest bedroom, and he’s never left like this. More often than not, he makes them breakfast in the morning, hangs out until noon or so the next day; early on, he’d been worried about imposing, about being a pain in the ass, but they’d made it as clear as they could that he was welcome as long as he wanted to be there, that they liked the company, especially his company. 

Maybe, she thinks, he just needs some alone time. Maybe he just needs to decompress. 

She feels suddenly very small and very uncertain, and starts the coffee in the kitchen just to busy her hands. She doesn’t think that she needs the caffeine right now, and as she stands in the kitchen, leans one hip against the counter, she decides that’s probably a bad idea all around, makes an about-face to head upstairs to the main bathroom. Showers have a good tendency to either help her problem-solve or help her not think about anything at all - usually Arin’s in with her when it’s that one, but regardless - and she gets it started before she’s even stripped her t-shirt and underwear off, lets the bathroom fill up with steam for a few moments before she steps inside. 

It doesn’t work. She stands under the spray - too hot, like always, and she’ll be annoyed for an hour after she gets out because she stays flushed in the face for too long - and washes her hair mechanically while her thoughts stubbornly refuse to quiet. They keep returning to Dan’s hands laid flat and obedient against his thighs and the infinitesimal ring of his iris around his huge, blown-black pupils when he said _please_ from his spot on the floor. 

_Obedient,_ she thinks, and then _I feel drunk,_ and then _oh._

She remembers to dry her hands off on the cloth outer shower curtain before she grabs her phone, but only barely. She starts shivering almost immediately while she hangs halfway out of the shower, hair dripping onto the tile. There’s shampoo trailing soapy rivulets down her back. 

As soon as Google opens - it takes forever, she feels like, of course it does - she’s typing _subspace_ with slippery fingers, trying her hardest not to shatter her stupid phone on her stupid floor. 

The first few results are about the mathematical concept, and for just a moment she thinks maybe she’s just imagining having read about it years ago, back when she and Arin thought maybe it was something they could do together - before they realized that they were suited for each other in absolutely every way besides that - and then it’s there, the seventh result. _In a D/s relationship,_ it says, and her eyes skim it a little, like her body can only handle one thing right now and that’s the plummeting feeling in her stomach, _...the sub may not be capable of making rational decisions about his/her safety and well-being at this point._

“Fuck,” she says, and sets her phone back down on the counter. 

She takes longer than she originally intended to once she sets her phone back down, spends a little too much time shaving and deep-conditioning, because she feels lost for words and somewhat like she’s trying to buy herself a little time. She’s got to bring it up to Arin, but it’s got to be in a way that won’t scare him off altogether.

He’s awake when she gets back into the bedroom, though, towel wrapped up high around her chest, and he doesn’t even really look at her, so she knows more or less right away that he’s having some kind of realization, too. 

“Hi,” he says, and she says _good morning_ to her underwear drawer, drops her towel on the floor while she pulls on house-clothes, the outfit-before-the-outfit. It’s early, still, barely eight. Arin wouldn’t normally be up this time of day, and he’s a little bleary as if to reflect that. “Danny went home,” she says, and pulls one of his t-shirts on, some shitty grey v-neck that he’s had for years and probably got out of a five-pack from Target. “His phone died, so he left a note.” 

“We should, uh,” he starts, and when she looks at him, he’s fidgeting a little, messing with his hair. “We need to talk about - stuff. Last night.” He’s got marks on his forearms from last night, little crescents still dug into his skin. There’s no way Dan meant to do that, she thinks, but she doubts Arin minds. He’s always liked shit like that - hickies and scratches and even bruises, sometimes, under the right circumstances. She figures Dan would always end up feeling guilty if he left them, though. 

“Yeah,” she says, and resists the temptation to climb back into bed. If she does, she won’t leave it again until noon, not if Arin’s there beside her. “I made coffee. Do you wanna come downstairs?” 

Arin stretches and nods, pulls himself out of bed with what looks like a not insignificant amount of effort. He’s tired, she thinks, and wonders how long he’s been awake and thinking, staring at the ceiling. They hadn’t gone to bed particularly late last night, and they’re both used to running on fumes, but - well. Last night was eventful. 

He follows her downstairs and he’s the first to sit, lets her make two big mugs of coffee and fix them - vanilla creamer in both, twice as much in his - and bring them over. She sits next to him instead of across from him, crosses her ankle over her knee to let her toes rest against his thigh. 

“We fucked up last night,” she says, but waits until she’s taken a couple drinks first. There are probably nicer ways to say it - more palatable, at least - but she figures this is a situation where being straightforward is more useful than being nice. 

“ _We_ did?” Arin says, and the emphasis is a little confusing, but she’ll roll with it. 

“We, like.” She shifts a little uncomfortably, opens Safari on her phone again. “That shit we were doing - that I was doing. Kind of - bossing him around. You know?” 

“I wasn’t really,” Arin starts, and clears his throat. “I was distracted.” 

“When I told him not to use his hands,” she says, because she fucking knows Arin remembers that, she heard him moan when she said it. “And fuckin’ - guided his head, and called him a _good boy_ , Arin, that shit’s not cool unless you talk about it first, we didn’t even give him a heads up.” 

“He didn’t mind,” Arin says, and there’s a weird dual note of comforting and defensiveness in his tone. “Babe, it took me, like, a minute and a half to get him off, he was _crazy_ fuckin’ worked up.” 

“Here,” she says, and slides her phone over to him. She’d left the definition up from earlier. She feels a little silly, all the sudden, watching him scroll through fucking Urban Dictionary like they’re teenagers looking up weird, degrading sex acts on the computer during study hall. 

“‘In a D/s relationship,’” Arin starts, “‘that very special place the submissive enters into’ - Suze, come on, we didn’t have him on a _leash_ , this makes it sound like we went, like. Full-on leather and chains and shit.” 

“It’s not, like,” she starts hotly, and cuts herself off, drums her fingers against the side of her mug. She doesn’t want to fight with him about this. “It’s not exactly what happened,” she tries after a moment. “But, like. I used to read about this shit _a lot_. Remember?” 

“Uh,” Arin says. “Vividly.” It had been something of a phase, she’d thought, where Arin gamely played along until she realized that normal sex was just as fun as handcuffs and blindfolds. Her aim was shitty with a riding crop, anyway. 

“So it doesn’t always have to be, like. Actually weird.” She takes a drink, and feels a little bit like she’s steeling herself. “I just. I think we fucked up. He did everything we said, and we didn’t clear anything beforehand, and I feel like I was super pushy, and he acted like he _wanted_ to do what I said, and you know him, would he have even said anything if he didn’t want to?” 

She takes a breath. Arin doesn’t say anything, and she’s not sure if it’s because he’s listening or because he thinks she’s being fucking crazy and doesn’t want to say it, so she presses on anyway. “And then he said he felt drunk, and he fell asleep really fast, and I - one of us should have hung out with him for a while, or something.” It all sort of tumbles out at once, and she knows she sounds guilty and a little miserable, and Arin’s arm wrapping around her shoulders doesn’t make her feel like less of an asshole but - it helps a little. 

“Shit,” he says. 

“Yeah,” she says, and it comes out mostly as a peep, right over the top edge of her mug. 

“That’s not, uh.” He coughs, and it’s fake, and it’s meant to buy him a few seconds. She doesn’t begrudge him that. She knows the feeling. “That’s not what I was gonna talk about.” 

_Fuck,_ she thinks, and then, _please don’t change your mind_ right on its heels. He can’t, he can’t turn around and quit after last night, after Suzy spending the last hour committing herself to working out whatever it is they did last night. But instead of saying any of that, she makes a questioning little hum, nestles into his side a little further. 

“Remember that first night he came over,” Arin says, “after we talked about - stuff?” 

“Yeah.” She doesn’t think she could forget it if she tried. 

“And we talked more, and I said I’d never really fucked around with a guy.” He shifts the arm around her shoulders, lets it rest more comfortably against the back of the chair. He sounds a little bit like she’s pulling the words out of him. “And he said he hadn’t, either.” 

_I can do it, Suze,_ Danny says in her head, looks up at her with both his hands around her husband’s dick and stars in his eyes. _I’ve done it before._

“Oh,” she says, like she’d said then. “Fuck.” 

“Yeah,” Arin says, and lets her pull away to look at him. He looks tired, mostly, eyes on his coffee, on his long fingers wrapped around the mug. “Like. That was one thousand percent not the first dick he’s ever sucked, and I don’t - he doesn’t just lie about shit, so I sort of don’t even want to ask about it, because if he’s not telling us there’s a _reason_ , but.” 

“We should,” she starts, and decides it then, doesn’t let herself think about it too hard or second-guess what’s coming out of her mouth, because she knows she’ll twist it around until she’s decided that talking about it is the wrong plan. 

( _Do you think you can take more,_ she says in her head, and Dan hums his little _mm-hm_ before he’s even had time to think about the answer, about whether he can or not or even wants to, eager and maybe a little desperate.)

She lets out a breath. “If this is gonna be a thing - like, a real thing - we should... we need to know this shit. So it can be good for everybody. And safe.” 

She feels goofily earnest and a little preachy, suddenly, and half expects Arin to call her out on how extraordinarily after-school-special that had sounded, but he just makes a little _hm_ instead, taps his fingers against his mug. 

“Yeah,” he says. He sound thoughtful in a way that she feels like she doesn’t hear often. Suzy’s thoughts quiet a little, then, and _don’t change your mind, don’t back out_ stops chasing itself around inside her head. “I’ll text him in a couple hours, he should be up by then. Should we - Barry’s out of town, should we go over there?” 

“Yeah,” Suzy says, and can’t resist adding, “we can bring lozenges and tea for his poor throat,” and Arin laughs and says _you’re a dick_ but punctuates it with a kiss. 

She knows she should go upstairs and work - she’s got a list of scripts to work on, and emails to answer, and countless other little things that will, by the end of the week, turn into big things, but even as the thought occurs to her she’s nestling back into Arin’s side. It can wait until after they talk to Dan, she thinks. Until then, she just wants to do this.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This would have actually gone up on time had I been able to figure out how to end it, and instead I just _kept writing_ , which is why it's coincidentally also like two thousand words longer than I intended. 
> 
> Big, big mood for this one: ["Smother"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1CiINFsBkY) by Daughter, especially 2:55 or thereabouts. I had this particular version on repeat the whole way through the last half of this chapter.

They don’t go over to Dan and Barry’s very often, and Suzy always feels a little out of place, a little bit like an intruder, when they do. Their own house is way more suited to social gatherings - it’s a lot bigger, and it’s set up more comfortably, and it feels a lot less like a place that two workaholics just happen to end up sleeping at sometimes. 

That’s the impression she gets from both of them, anyway; Barry mentioned once that despite living with Dan, they really didn’t see each other any more often than he and Ross or Danny and Arin. They split the rent and chores, but it’s more that they inhabit the same space and less that they _live together_ , she thinks. 

Despite that, it’s still at least somewhat comfortable when she and Arin show up around eleven - later than they planned, because even on their day off, they both end up down a rabbit hole of work emails - and Suzy has to chalk it up to Dan being there at all. He opens the door in what she’s ninety percent sure is Arin’s hoodie and she knows, somewhere in the back of her head, that she should let him make the first move, that he should get to establish his boundaries after last night, but her instinct is to hug him and that’s what she does, closes the gap between them to get her arms around him, and she can feel the tension seep out of his skinny body almost as soon as she does. 

“Well, hi,” he says, and smoothes one hand over the back of her hair. He sounds - rough, she thinks, grainy and more than a little sore. 

“You smell good,” she says, mostly into his chest. 

“Thanks,” he says, “I don’t know why,” and Arin laughs from behind her, puts a hand on her hip, kisses Dan from over the top of her head. 

“Good morning,” Dan says, and she wriggles out from in between them, watches Dan put a hand on Arin’s jaw to tilt his face towards him and kiss him for real. Arin’s hands find their way to Dan’s hips, then, rest there comfortable and heavy until the kiss breaks, and then one’s running a little nervously through his own hair. 

“Hi,” he says, and clears his throat. “Uh. Good morning.”

Danny stands there for a second, looking at them both and smiling beatifically, and then seems to gather himself. “Sorry - come in,” he says, “I can - there’s tea, or like - coffee, probably? It’s Barry’s, so,” as though there are really that many feasible variations of coffee and Barry’s picked something they won’t drink. 

Suzy knows that the polite thing is to say that they’re fine and to get to what they want to talk about, but she doesn’t generally pass up coffee when it’s offered and she isn’t really _excited_ to have the conversation - conversations, plural - that they’re going to have to have, so she says _oh, shit, yes please_ and ignores the look Arin gives her when Dan’s back is turned. 

She gets Arin a mug, too, because he’ll end up stealing hers to drink out of and then making a face when he realizes that there’s not enough cream or sugar, and if she dallies a little in the kitchen - well, she doesn’t think Arin can blame her. Dan’s in the living room with him, and it’s only about thirty seconds before she catches a burst of giggles from Danny first, then her husband. 

They should just leave it, she thinks suddenly. They could just say they came over to hang out and they could leave in an hour or so and nobody would have to talk about anything, and everything would be fine. _Arin would roll with it_ , she thinks, _if I went out there and just - never brought it up._ He doesn’t want to talk about it any more than she does. It would be a little awkward for a few minutes, probably, because it’s fucking weird that they’d just come over like this, but they’d get past it and it’d be fine. 

But when she gets into the living room, Dan’s in the big, comfortable armchair, folded in on himself like an origami swan, wrapped in a throw blanket even though he’s wearing a hoodie and the apartment’s at least seventy degrees, and Arin’s on the couch, and - they’re talking, it’s not like they’re sitting there in silence staring at their hands, but. 

“So, like,” Dan starts, once she’s set the mugs down and taken a seat. He looks less tranquil and more like he’s just still, now. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like you guys didn’t come over to drink Barry’s coffee. And you _probably_ didn’t come over to bang, because you know my bed’s not big enough for all three of us.” 

She looks at Arin, and Arin looks at her, and when she looks back at Dan he’s not looking at either of them anymore, studying the fringed edges of the hole in his jeans.

“We just, like,” Arin starts, and clears his throat, and reaches up to rub the back of his neck, fucks with his hair a little on his hand’s way back to his lap. “Suzy and I were talking this morning, and we thought, like. We need to talk about some shit.” 

As soon as he says it, Suzy wishes she would have instead. She doesn’t know how she’d have phrased it, or even if there’s really a _different_ way to phrase it, but surely there’s a way to say it that doesn’t make Dan’s head snap up like that, and Arin doesn’t see - he’s staring at a spot on the floor just to the left of his feet - but she does, and Dan returns to looking at his jeans like it never happened at all as soon as he meets her eyes. That makes it worse, somehow. 

“Oh,” he says, and it comes out easily and almost-cheerfully but there’s an undercurrent of carefulness that she hates. “Right on. Did you guys, uh - change your minds?” 

And then Suzy gives up her pretense of not watching him, looks up to find him looking at them, too, both of them caught and neither looking away. He looks vulnerable in a way that she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him; it’s that he’s so carefully blank, she decides, so clearly ready to be totally fine with whatever it is they end up saying. His hand stills where it was fucking with his jeans, a little thread still caught between his fingers. 

“No,” she says, and nothing in Dan’s face changes. “But last night was fucked up, and I think _we_ kind of fucked up, and we need to talk about it.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Arin’s looking at her, and she knows then that it doesn’t matter how much they talked about this at home or how they planned out the conversation on the drive over, she’s going to be the one explaining it. It’s fine - she’d almost rather it go that way - but she’s still got to take a breath to steady herself. 

“We didn’t go over anything with you,” she says, after a silence that feels like it drags on for far too long. “Before anything happened last night. We should have talked shit out.” 

Dan laughs, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes and it drops off his face too fast to have been real in the first place. “I, like,” he says, “ _distinctly_ remember saying I was cool with everything.” 

“Right,” Suzy says, because she can’t argue with that ( _I can do it,_ Dan says in her head again). “It’s not - not so much that. I guess. I mean the - ” And there she has to break herself off for a moment, has to fidget just a little in her seat, pray that her face isn’t turning pink. “Everything else,” she says finally, weakly. “The - telling you what to do, and stuff.” 

“Suze,” Dan says, “Jesus, I didn’t - trust me, you weren’t, like - I wasn’t doing anything I didn’t wanna do.” 

“It was, like,” she starts, and has to take a second, two, three, to decide if she wants to go there, if she’s going to commit to telling Dan that she understands his sexual experience better than he does. “It was pretty distinctly not, like, a normal vanilla blowjob, though,” she manages finally. “We should have laid down some ground rules. What if you _weren’t_ cool with something we did?”

“But I was,” Dan says, just a touch stubbornly. She feels like he’s purposefully not understanding her. “So it’s cool.” 

“But if you _hadn’t_ been,” Arin says, speaks up so unexpectedly that it actually startles her a little - and it’s unexpected, yes, but he’s gentle in a way that she doesn’t hear from him very often. “You weren’t in a position where you could say so, and that means I was in a position where I could have hurt you and not even known it, and that’s.” He shrugs one shoulder uncomfortably, looks back down. She and Danny are both looking at him, and Dan is still warily blank, but his eyes never leave Arin, not even when Suzy’s looking at him. “I don’t like that.” 

There’s a flash of irritation that Arin’s somehow making it about himself, even after their long talk this morning and the follow-up on the drive over, but as soon as it comes it’s chased by the realization why, and then a tinge of guilt directly after that. They’re not going to get through to Dan talking about why it could have hurt him, she thinks, but they can by talking about how it could have hurt _them_ , and how it could have hurt Arin especially. He knows how Dan works better than pretty much anyone, she thinks, maybe short of Brian. 

“Oh,” Dan says after a few long moments, and that’s it. 

The silence stretches out again, a little fragile, until Suzy says, “I’m kind of curious about how you felt afterward. You said - I think you said you felt drunk.” 

“Yeah,” Dan says eventually. “Just - you know. Kind of out of it, and super tired.”

“You seemed kind of out of it during,” she says, and knows she’s taking a risk when she does it, because it’s one thing to talk about the concept of accidentally taking advantage of someone during sex and something completely different to actually discuss specifics while they’re sitting in a living room at noon on a Sunday. 

“I dunno.” Dan shifts, pulls his knees up closer to his chest, loops one arm around them. “I was - I knew what I was doing. I _wanted_ to, Suze, I feel like you think you, like - pushed me into blowing your husband or something.” 

“I know you wanted to,” she says, “I’m not trying to - I don’t think we did anything, like - wrong. I just.” She rubs her hand over her face. “We should know what’s going on before anything happens again, and we should have a - a baseline, I guess. And I don’t mean _we_ like me and Arin, I mean _we_ like all of us.” 

“Okay,” Dan says. He seems to hesitate for a moment, and then, in a quiet little torrent, “I think I was kind of out of it during. But in a good way. Like - I could only focus on what you were saying, and it was fuckin’ awesome and I was super into it, but then I felt crazy drained afterwards, and I kind of felt like shit after I woke up and so I just - bailed.” 

Beside her, Arin tips his head onto her shoulder. He’s listening, she can tell from the way he’s holding himself, but there’s something uniquely draining about this conversation for him that she thinks she should probably ask him about once they’re back home. 

“Yeah,” Suzy says, and gets one arm around Arin’s waist. “That’s kind of what I wondered.” 

“We should take things slower,” Arin says. “Not - I don’t think we should stop, or whatever. But we should have - they have fuckin’. Quizzes and shit on the internet. Like - real ones, like surveys you do with your - your partners, or whatever, so you can find out what everybody’s cool with.”

“Cool,” Dan says earnestly, “we can have a sleepover where we braid each other’s hair and find out if anybody’s into watersports,” and Suzy and Arin are both startled into laughing. 

“This is super weird for us, too,” Arin says after a few moments, when it’s gotten quiet again, when Dan’s back to looking at anything but them. “Like. You’re totally weirded out, and so are we, so can we just be weird together instead of letting it just be weird?” 

“Yeah,” Dan says immediately, “yes, please.” 

Suzy turns her head. Arin’s positioned perfectly so that she can talk in his ear, and it feels a little sneaky and shitty to do it right there in Dan’s living room, but she still murmurs _are you gonna ask him?_ quietly enough that he can’t hear her. 

He doesn’t, though, not for a few more moments, and even then it starts carefully. “Speaking of, like,” he says, “vaguely weird. I have a question.” 

“Okay,” Dan says. “I think I just inadvertently admitted to a couple weird kinks I didn’t really know I had, so fuckin’ - shoot, I guess.” 

Arin shifts next to her, and she knows they’re both wishing, suddenly, that Dan didn’t think that Arin’s joking. “I’m not asking to be an asshole,” he says, and stalls a little, clears his throat. “I just, like. You said a couple weeks ago - I said I never did anything with guys, and you said you hadn’t either, but last night you told Suzy you’d - you know. Done that. Before.” 

“Oh,” Dan says, and that’s it for a handful of long moments. 

“I just,” Arin says, and falters, and dies off. “We need to be honest with each other if this is gonna be a thing. That’s all.” 

Suzy can’t take her eyes off of Dan. For a couple of minutes, the careful mask had been gone, and now it’s back and seems immovable. 

“I had a couple boyfriends in Philly,” he says, and there’s a casualness in his voice so forced that Suzy wishes Arin had never asked at all. “I just, like. Don’t like talking about that shit, I guess, and when you asked I kind of panicked. And I’d never told you anything about it before, and it felt like a fuckin’ big thing to just be like - _oh, by the way_ \- you know?” 

“Yeah,” Arin says, and then voices what she’s thinking, too. “Jesus, dude. Does anybody else know?” 

Dan shrugs one skinny shoulder. “No. Not really.” 

She has a hard time believing that Brian doesn’t have at least some of the story, whatever it is, but carefully doesn’t voice that. “Is it just, like,” she says, “not something you’re cool with talking about, or?” 

“It just, like.” Dan’s digging his thumbnail into the cuticle on his index finger and Suzy is seized, for just a moment, by the urge to say _hands at your sides, stop doing that, stop hurting yourself_ , because she knows he’d do it in a heartbeat - but that sinking feeling from this morning is back in the pit of her stomach and she keeps her mouth shut. “It wasn’t awesome. I guess. I - obviously I wasn’t out, and I was pretty young, and I was high all the time and made some stupid decisions, and it wasn’t great.” 

Maybe she’s filling in the blanks with something worse than what it was - and she is, she has to be, bad things don’t happen to goofy, eager Danny - but Suzy can suddenly only think about how Dan must have been back then, young and sweet and lonely and even more desperate to please than he is now, can only think about the kind of guy that would maybe see a jackpot in someone like him. Arin’s thinking the same thing, she knows, and the fingers he’d been tapping against his thigh have stilled completely. _It wasn’t great,_ she thinks. 

Dan fidgets a little, shifts in his seat like he can't get comfortable. “I just didn't wanna talk about it. I guess,” he says finally, and his voice is smaller than she expects. 

“That’s fine,” Arin says immediately, quiet. “It’s totally cool.” 

“I’m sorry,” Suzy says after a few moments. The room feels very large, all the sudden, and there seems to be too much space between all of them, even with Arin pressed up against her. “You didn’t have to tell us that.” 

“No,” Dan says quickly, “Arin’s right, if this is gonna be a thing we need to all be honest, I just.” He falls silent, seems to struggle a little to come up with his words. “I didn’t know how to say it, so I just. Didn’t.” 

There’s more to it than that, she thinks, but doesn’t say it. “Okay,” she says instead. 

“And if we’re doing this thing where we’re honest and shit,” Dan says, and starts fucking with the hole in the knee of his jeans again, tugs out a thread so long she wonders if it damages the structural integrity of his pants altogether, “that whole conversation was scary as shit and kind of exhausting and I’ve been up since, like, three this morning, and I kind of want to take an Ativan and a nap.” 

The sudden bluntness is what makes it funny, not the content, but Suzy laughs a little anyway, huffs it out quiet and barely audible. “Yeah,” she says, “I bet,” and stands up, and Arin follows her a moment after. She sort of expects Dan to stay where he is but he gets up, too, untangles himself to join them. 

“We can talk about it more later,” Arin says, and then adds, a little hastily, like he’s trying to get it all out at once, “but I think you should come over some night this week and we can talk about shit more. Just - get everything out in the open. If you’re cool with that.” 

“That sounds like it’ll be also scary as shit,” Dan says, “so sure, absolutely,” and then, at Arin’s expression, “I’m - fuckin’ - Arin, _honesty is important,_ ” and laughs like he can’t keep the bit going, even though it’s only halfway a bit in the first place. 

He hugs Suzy first, wraps his long arms around her and squeezes gently, and she leans up on her toes to kiss him gentle on the mouth, lets it last a little longer than she means to. He hesitates with Arin a little, and Suzy’s not even sure Arin notices it - she’s not sure if _Dan_ even notices - but after what feels like a heartbeat of uncertainty, Arin’s drawing Danny up against him in a hug, relaxing a little when Dan almost immediately nestles into his shoulder. 

“Eat something before you go to sleep,” Arin murmurs, pets one hand over Dan’s hair. Dan makes a little humming noise in acknowledgement. Suzy can feel herself smiling, just a little, faintly, and they just - exist for a moment, comfortable and quiet and close, and Dan’s the first one to draw away. 

“Okay,” he says, a belated answer to what Arin had said, she’s pretty sure, or maybe it’s just him saying the first thing that comes to mind. He looks tired, bruise-blue shadows faint under his eyes. She hadn’t noticed before. 

“Okay,” Arin repeats fondly. “Go take your anxiety nap.” 

“That’s a good song title,” Dan says. “ _Anxiety Nap._ ” 

Arin kisses him in the middle of the little laugh that follows, quick and careful. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll text you later tonight, okay? We both will.” 

Dan nods, and kisses him, and looks at her. “Cool,” he says, “if you don’t, I will, ’cuz I’m kinda clingy.” He grins at her with his bottom lip caught between his teeth, looks for a moment like he’s not sure if that was a funny joke or not. “Honesty and whatever, right?” 

“Honesty and whatever,” she says affirmatively, and then, “text me when you wake up, okay?” 

It seems like the right thing to say - an instruction instead of a somewhat-vague _we’ll text you_ \- and she thinks it is; Dan looks immediately a little less uneasy, the tightness around his eyes that she hadn’t quite registered fading away. “Yeah,” he says, “okay,” and she kisses him again, leans up on her toes to do it, and it’s really only a peck but when she settles back to flat feet his whole face has seemed to soften in the few seconds between his speaking and her kiss. 

“We’ll see you later,” she says, and all the sudden dislikes the idea of leaving him in his lonely little apartment by himself, even just to pop an Ativan and go to sleep, but there’s no good, non-creepy way to say _this seems sad, come home with us instead_ , so she leaves it at that and follows Arin to the door.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's back / back again / I am back / tell a friend
> 
> (Sorry about the wait. No excuses, just hit a wall. Love y'all. [I wrote another thing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12667533) and [I have a new sideblog](bisexualdanavidan.tumblr.com), and that's what you missed on Glee.)

They wait a few days after that to make any more moves. Not that they _stop_ anything - Dan comes over the night after and falls asleep on Arin’s shoulder halfway through _Corpse Bride_ , partially because he’s seen it a thousand times with them and partially, Suzy thinks, because he’s exhausted all the time lately. 

It’s good. It’s intimate. He stays the night again, but it’s not on the couch, this time, and since his phone is dead he uses Arin’s to send a sleepy Snapchat to Barry - _@ Arin’s, not dead_ \- before he nods off in the middle of their bed in his boxers and t-shirt. For a few moments, Suzy thinks maybe it’ll be weird; he and Arin have shared a bed before - Danny’s shared a bed with most of the people in their friend circle - but she’s never crossed that particular line with him, and she doesn’t really like sleeping with people anyway, and what if he snores, or what if _she_ snores, and Arin’s always just been too in love to say anything about it - 

But she’s worrying over nothing. As soon as she’s underneath their big comforter, with Arin sandwiched between the two of them and Dan breathing slow and steady on his other side, she knows she’s worrying over nothing.

* * *

It happens again a few days later, and Dan is more than agreeable when Arin mumbles _hang out for a while_ into his neck in the morning. He and Suzy make breakfast together - Dan mostly scrambles the eggs and gets things out of the fridge for her, but he’s still more help than Arin, who means well but gets distracted and wanders off halfway through and only manages to find his way back to the kitchen when it seems like things are making their ways onto plates. Arin sits at the table with his coffee like the dad in a fifties family sitcom, looking satisfied and comfortable. 

They’re halfway through their third episode of _Bake Off_ \- she and Arin on the couch, Dan sprawled out in their laps, his head on Suzy’s thighs and her fingers carding through his hair - when he says, “So, I Googled some stuff the other night.” 

Arin turns the volume down on the TV. 

“Mm-hmm,” Suzy prompts after a moment. 

“There’s, like.” Dan shifts a little. “A quiz you can take. Like, one person takes it on a computer, and then the next person takes it after them on the same computer, and it’ll save both your answers and tell you - I think the ones you both agree on.” He falls quiet for a moment, like he’s uncertain. “I don’t know. It seemed like - useful, I guess.” 

“It is,” Arin says, and drums his fingers where they’re resting on Dan’s calf. “We - Suze, we took that, once, didn’t we?” 

“We did,” she says, “that’s where we learned about your public sex thing, remember?” 

Dan sits up. “You have a public sex thing?” 

“No,” Arin says immediately. “Why? Do you?” 

“ _No,_ ” Dan says, “but that’s the fuckin’ least surprising thing I can think of, holy shit, why am I surprised by that?” 

“He definitely has a public sex thing,” Suzy says serenely. “But with great internet fame comes great responsibility, and that responsibility includes not having public sex. With anyone. Including me, and also including you.” 

“It’s horseshit,” Arin says. “Why even bother being a minor internet celebrity if you can’t fuck somebody in the changing room at the Gap?” 

Dan lets that go for a moment, and then manages, “You’re into the _weirdest shit._ ” 

“Okay, well,” Arin says, flustered, “on that note, yes, we’re familiar with - I don’t remember what it’s called, but we totally took it - the whole last page was super weird, right? Like, straight up fetish shit.” 

“I don’t know!” Dan says. “I didn’t take it, I felt weird,” and Suzy laughs, tugs gently at his hair to draw him in for a kiss. He tastes like cinnamon, and responds like he almost always does, delighted and a little bit eager, like he’s just happy to be kissing her. Being around Dan is probably bad for her self-esteem, in a weird way, in that he makes her feel like the best, most important person on the planet, and it’s probably unsustainable when he isn’t around. 

“Do you wanna take it?” she says, and only notices then that one of her hands is cupping his jaw, thumb brushing right underneath his cheekbone. It’s where her hand always goes when they’re _really_ kissing - like it had the other night, when Arin had said, soft and a little breathless, _I really just wanna watch you two kiss, is that weird?_ and they had answered him with a bout of kissing that had ended with Suzy in Dan’s lap, his hands anchored firmly on her hips. 

“Kinda,” Dan says now, a little bit uncertainly. 

“Okay,” she says, and taps her thumb against his cheekbone a couple of times, kisses him quick and gentle on the lips before she stands up. “My iPad’s upstairs, hold on.” 

When she gets back, Arin and Dan are kissing just like she and Dan had been, which she pretty much expected - Arin doesn’t get jealous, but he does seem to see things like that and decide he wants his own version, too; possessive, she thinks, might be a better word, but in the good way. It seems sweet, almost, the way Arin’s got his hand at the back of Dan’s head, the other arm braced against the back of the couch so he can lean forward over him. 

She clears her throat anyway, grins at the way they break apart like necking teenagers caught outside the homecoming dance. “Hi,” she says, and perches next to Dan to unlock her iPad. “Do you wanna take it first?” 

He fidgets a little. “Sure,” he says, somewhat unconvincingly. “Does it matter who takes it first?”

“Nope.” Suzy’s not sure why she remembers what the website is - it's probably been two years since she and Arin did this - but she does, and she brings it up quickly and hands him the iPad. “Do you wanna go, like. Over to the chair? That way neither of us can see your answers.” 

“Sure,” Dan says, and adds, with a marked absence of venom, “no cheating, fuckers,” and presses a kiss against her hair before he stands up and stretches and heads over to the chair. Suzy watches, but only until he sits down, and then scoots over closer to Arin; he’s watching Danny, too, eyes on his face and the careful way he’s navigating the setup screen. He winds one arm around her after a few moments, big hand resting splayed on her hip, and then seems to turn his attention back to the television - they both keep sneaking glances at Dan, though, although it isn’t like they can avoid doing that normally, either. 

“Oh, no,” Dan says after a few quiet minutes pass, and when Suzy looks over to him, Mimi’s clambered into his lap and climbed halfway up his chest, nosing curiously at his chin and purring loud enough that even Suzy can hear her. “Oh, Mimi, don’t snuggle me while I’m doing this, it feels so wrong.” 

“She’s a creep,” Suzy says, but gets up to save him anyway, scoops Mimi up with both arms. She deposits a kiss on Dan’s temple for good measure before she goes back to the couch; Mimi squirms in her arms for a few seconds before she goes ragdoll-limp and lets herself be deposited into Arin’s lap. 

She keeps glancing at him, though. She sort of feels like she can’t help it. There are a couple of times she catches him making a face - once, his brow is furrowed like he’s concerned, and once he looks exceptionally startled - and she turns her attention back to what they’re watching, but she still wonders what question he hit that made his eyebrows shoot skyward like that. 

“Man,” he says after a little while, “I thought I was all sex-positive and stuff, but I don’t even know what some of this shit is. I feel old.” 

“Nah,” Arin says, and stretches. “Don’t feel old. I had to Google a bunch of shit when I took it.”

Dan doesn’t reply, really, just makes a little _hm_ noise and goes back to what he’s doing. He’s taking longer than Suzy expects, but then, she figures, he’s probably really thinking about his answers, especially after their conversation a few days ago. 

“Okay,” he says finally, “I’m - I put in Suzy’s name? When it asked for the second partner. So do I just take it again when Arin and I do it?” 

Suzy looks at Arin and Arin looks back at her. These, she thinks, are the details that websites devoted to polyamory should focus on. There’s a distinct lack of practicality about kink on the internet that she finds irritating. “Probably,” she decides finally. “I bet there’s an easier way to do it, but.” 

“It wasn’t very long,” Dan says, and shrugs one skinny shoulder. “And now I know the questions, so.” 

She’s familiar with the quiz, and it doesn’t take her long to get through it once she’s got the iPad from Dan - she’s got to remind herself, at the beginning, that she’s taking it with not-Arin, and that’s a little bit of a mindfuck. There isn’t much she’d do with Arin but not Dan, or vice versa, but it’s still worth thinking about. 

“So,” she says, and hits _finished_. “This will tell us, like - it compares our answers, and it only shows us stuff we agree on. So even if I hit _yes_ to something, if you don’t select _yes_ , too, or like - _if my partner is interested_ \- it won’t show up in my column. I think so nobody feels pressured.” 

“Cool,” Dan says. He’s sitting on the arm of the couch next to Arin. Arin’s got one arm wrapped around his waist, head resting against his ribs. “Should - I bet you could just open an incognito and Arin could take it now? So that way he doesn’t know any of my kinky secrets and change his answers. Or whatever.” 

“I know, like,” Arin says, and headbutts him gently, “seventy percent of your kinky secrets.” 

“So you think,” Dan says, and leans over way too far to kiss the side of Arin’s head, ends up slipping almost all the way off of his perch. He lands the kiss, though, and Arin tips his head up to catch him on the lips before he can move away. It turns into a longer kiss than Suzy figures they mean for it to, Dan’s hand laced through Arin’s hair, and when it breaks, they’re smiling at each other. 

“I don’t know how we waited so long for this,” she says, and doesn’t entirely mean to say it out loud, but. 

“Yeah,” Dan says, and shifts his gaze from Arin to her, but he doesn’t lose any of the heart-eyed stupid he’d had when he was looking at her husband, and she feels something flutter in her stomach for just a moment. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” 

“Shush,” Arin says, to one or both of them, “I’m taking a test.” 

“C’mere, Suze,” Danny says, and slides off the arm of the couch, makes his way over to the big armchair where he’d been before. “Let’s let Poindexter do his thing, I wasn’t done kissing and I’m not picky.” 

“Oh, thanks,” she says, but settles into his lap as soon as he’s settled himself, sits sidesaddle with her knees drawn up a little, and he rests one arm across the top of them and then rests his chin in his palm to look at her. “Come here often?” he says, pitches his voice a little low like it’s his idea of sexy, and she manages to kiss him before she laughs too hard at it. 

He’s sweet about it, easygoing and warm and gentle, and when he gets a hand into her hair like he’d done with Arin, he doesn’t curl his fingers to pull, laces them through delicately like he’s petting a cat instead. She’s not as nice back, tugs a little when she threads her fingers into his curls, but it’s more playful than purposeful and she can feel him smiling against her mouth. 

“That is so much more fucking distracting than if you’d stayed over here,” Arin grumbles after a few minutes, “but I powered through.” 

“Oh,” Suzy says, “good,” and kisses Dan for a few moments longer before she swings her legs off of his lap. He tails her over to the couch, and she sits between the two of them, grabs for the iPad before Arin can finalize anything. She’s more curious than she thought she’d be - originally, she had just been sort of relieved that they were doing this at all. 

‘“Oh, God,” Dan says, and buries his face in her shoulder. He’d watched her click _analyze_ on their quiz. “I don’t wanna look.” 

She turns to kiss his temple. “You gotta,” she says, a touch sympathetically. “That’s the point.” 

Dan heaves a sigh and straightens back up marginally. “It would work just as well,” he says, “if you just knew all _mine,_ and we never had to discuss anything ever,” and then falls silent, because the page actually loads. 

“Okay, so,” Suzy says after a few long, long moments. “Pegging.” 

“So,” Dan echoes, “pegging.” When she looks at him, he’s determinedly not looking at the screen. “It’s. You know. A thing.” There are spots of color dancing high on his cheeks that he’s clearly trying his best to ignore. 

Dan’s answers lean almost exclusively towards _if my partner is interested_ , which Suzy feels like she should have guessed. Hers tend much more strongly towards a solid _yes_.

“Huh,” Arin says next to her. “Blindfolds.” 

That had been one of her _if my partner is interested_ answers. She doesn’t like it - she and Arin have played around with most of that sort of thing before - but she had guessed that Dan would be into it, some kind of mostly-vanilla sensory play, and she’s pleased to see that she was right; it’s one of his few _yes_ answers. That, and _have my face slapped during sex_ , which is even less surprising, somehow, even if it makes her stomach twist a little. 

(She wonders if he hit _yes_ for that on his other quiz. Something in her likes the idea of watching Arin do that, and something in her thinks that maybe it would make her want to throw up.) 

“It seems fun,” Dan says diplomatically, and jerks her out of her thoughts. 

“I think it would be,” she says, and squeezes his thigh gently where her hand’s been resting for the last couple minutes. She’s started doing that a lot lately, just letting her hand rest somewhere on Dan’s body - his waist, or his thigh, or his knee. Arin’s been doing it since before any of this even started. “I don’t know about combining some of this, but one at a time, I think you’d have fun.” 

“Combining some of this seems physically impossible,” Dan says, and rests his head on her shoulder again. She hasn’t looked at him again, but she’d chance to guess that his face is red. 

“But,” Arin says, “worth trying,” and she huffs out a laugh but doesn’t argue. Some of it is, at least. Some of it seems more like jerk-off fodder. She still reads it through again, scrolls back up to see what the site has helpfully outlined for them - _be rougher in sex towards Dan_ , the blindfolds, _use restraints on Dan_ , _be submissive for Suzy_. That one makes her stomach do a little flip, and she rubs her thumb over Dan’s knee, breathes careful like she thinks they’ll notice the change.

She clicks over to Arin’s test, and she’s struck immediately by how many more _yes_ answers there are on Arin’s part compared to hers - she thought she’d been direct, but it’s nothing compared to his. 

“You have made,” Danny starts, “ _so many jokes_ about me watching you jerk off in the last four years, how the fuck am I surprised by that?” 

“Joke’s on you,” Arin says, “it totally wasn’t a joke,” and she’s not sure which one of them starts laughing first but they seem to both need a break after that, nervous-giggling with Dan’s head buried in her shoulder and Arin’s tipped back against the back of the couch. 

“This is fuckin’ ridiculous,” Dan says, and hiccups. “This whole thing is insane. I swear to God, if Arin wants to peg me - ”

“That would just be fucking you,” Arin interrupts, “and trust me, dude, I _one thousand percent_ know I wanna do that, I don’t need a quiz to tell me.” 

“ _Guys_ ,” Suzy says, and they both sort of come back around after that, Arin audibly clearing his throat like he’s settling in again. They’re taking longer with this one, she notices distantly. There are more surprises here, somehow. Dan hit _yes_ on things with this quiz that he hadn’t hit on hers, but it’s all stuff she isn’t surprised by - _talk dirtier to Dan_ , _be rougher_ , _cum on Dan’s face_. He’s going to be sweet with her for a while yet, she thinks. 

She scrolls, and the first thing on what the quiz calls its BDSM section is _knife and gun play - have a weapon directed at Dan during sex_ , and she’s not sure if she’s more surprised by Arin’s maybe or Dan’s hard yes. 

“Whoa,” Arin says, like he’s vocalizing her thoughts. 

“Like,” Dan says immediately, as if he were bracing himself for it, “it’s - I don’t know, it’s just a thing, I had a boyfriend that was into it and. I don’t know. Not - like - not _guns_ or anything, just.” He clears his throat and falls silent, like maybe what he was going to offer like it was better or less intense than a gun really wasn’t. 

“Well,” Suzy says, “we were already gonna have the safeword talk, and now we’re _really_ having the safeword talk, my _goodness_.” 

“For the record,” Arin says after a moment, “I’d like it recognized that I put that I could be into it. Like. Weird as shit, totally cool with that.”

There’s a whole row of that, Suzy thinks. Dan’s got hard yeses to Arin’s maybes on a lot of this column - being hit in the face, being blindfolded, being restrained, having his hair pulled, being spanked, being bitten, being submissive. She can’t say she’s surprised by any of it - she’s the opposite of surprised by most of it - although it does make her reevaluate a few things somewhere in the back of her head, careful and precise. 

“Okay, so,” she says, and sets the iPad on the coffee table. She means to ask what his safewords have been before, but what comes out instead is, “Have you ever used a safeword before?” 

Both of the boys have shifted around so that they can look at her a little more easily, Dan sitting facing towards her on the couch with his knee drawn up to his chest and Arin sitting cross-legged next to her, turned a little to face her. She feels like the center of attention and for once she’s not sure she likes it that much. 

“Not really,” Dan says after a moment. “Like, I get it as a concept, or whatever? Just. I kind of tripped and fell dick-first into most of this.” 

She bites back the impossibly strong urge to tell Dan that there’s no tripping into someone blindfolding him or tying him down or hitting him in the face during sex and makes the conscious effort to breathe out through her nose instead, taps her fingers in a little one-two-three against her thigh a few times. “Okay,” she says. “Arin, what’s yours?” 

“Plaid,” he says. “Or three, like - ” He taps his fingers three times against the couch cushion, hard enough to make a distinct sound. 

“Plaid?” Dan echoes, but in what seems like a curious way instead of mocking. 

“One syllable,” Arin says, and shrugs. “I’ve never used it? But, like. You’ve seen me have anxiety attacks, I can’t fuckin’ talk, I could get _plaid_ out if shit went south. Or tap.” 

“Huh,” Dan says, a little wonderingly. “And you wear a lot of plaid.”

“That too,” Arin says. 

“Mine’s _hairspray_ ,” Suzy says. “I think I’ve only used it once, and we didn’t have to, like - stop for good? It just meant we needed a break.” 

“That makes sense,” Dan says, but doesn’t sound like he entirely believes what he’s saying. He looks like he’s thinking, and neither of them say anything to interrupt that; he’s drumming his fingers against his ankle, jerky and nervous. “Am I - I’m supposed to, like. Come up with one?” 

Suzy has to think for a minute before she says anything, has to figure out a way to explain it that doesn’t come across preachy or insincere or some horrifying conglomeration of both. “We’re all into pretty much the same stuff,” she starts. “And I think it would be - you know - fun, and rewarding, if we got to explore some of the stuff on our lists. But we have to be safe about it, and you being able to tap out when you need to is part of that.” 

“Okay, but I trust both of you,” Dan says, and sounds like he believes that’s a legitimate answer. 

“Then trust us to listen if you say you need to stop,” Arin says, jumps in ahead of whatever she was going to say - she didn’t know what she was going to say, only that she knew she couldn’t say _why are you so goddamn stubborn about the weirdest things_ like she wanted to for a split second. “Or take a break, or whatever.” 

Dan’s quiet for a little bit. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.” 

“There’s a color check-in, too,” Arin says. “We use that sometimes. Like - Suze, you can explain it better than me.” 

“It’s like a traffic light,” she says. Dan’s just far away enough that she can’t touch him casually, and she doesn’t care for it. “So we’ll check in - or you’ll check in, or whatever - and usually it’s just, you know, ‘color?’, and if everything’s good you’ll say ‘green’, and if you need a break or need to change something it’s ‘yellow’, and if something’s wrong it’s ‘red’. But ‘red’ works for a safeword, too, if that’s. You know. Easier. It means the same thing either way.”

“I like that,” Dan says. “‘Red’. Do you guys use the color thing?” 

“Once in a while,” Arin says. It’s a little more frequent than that; it only took one rougher-than-intended incident for Arin to check in with an almost annoying frequency for months. He’s sweet, and it means he cares, she knows that. Dan will like that. 

Dan makes a little humming noise like he’s thinking about it. “Cool,” he says finally. “Okay. Red works for me, if you guys are cool with it.” 

“It’s yours,” Suzy reminds him, a touch more gently than she means to. “It’s whatever you’re comfortable with, and feel like you’ll remember. That’s what matters, not if we like it.” 

“Okay, well,” he says, “in that case, I’m changing it to ‘flurmp’.” 

“That’s what I expected the entire time,” Arin says, and Suzy laughs even if she’s sort of trying to get them to be serious about this. “Also, dude, now I _do_ know all your kinky secrets.” 

“The fuck you do,” Dan says. “That thing didn’t say shit about choking.” 

Suzy feels her face growing very warm all the sudden, and she’s not a hundred percent sure if she’s embarrassed or turned on or both, and neither one of those options stops her from squeaking “ _Dan!_ ” in a much more scandalized tone than she’d normally allow. 

“I have _layers,_ Suzy,” he says, over Arin’s helpless laughter behind her. He shifts so that they’re sitting next to each other, gets one arm around her waist from behind, pulls her into a side-hug. He smells good, like Arin. He used Arin’s soap in the shower this morning, and he’s wearing one of Arin’s flannels over the t-shirt he’d been wearing yesterday. Suzy thinks, distantly, that he should maybe start keeping a couple changes of clothes here. 

“Like an onion,” she says. 

“Yes,” Dan says, and kisses her temple, and she feels suddenly very small and very loved, feels it bloom in her chest like a campfire. “Like a weird, gangly onion.” 

“You smell way better than an onion,” Arin says, and leans over her head to kiss him on the mouth, quick and sweet and as chaste as it ever gets with the two of them. “And speaking of food. We were doing this thing where we were all cuddling and watching _Bake-Off_ earlier, and I personally vote we get back to that.” 

“I second that motion,” Dan says. He clearly, she thinks, wants to move past their discussion from just a few minutes ago, and there’s more that needs to be said - more questions that need to be answered, more boundaries that need to be defined - but, she thinks, it doesn’t necessarily have to happen right now. “Chairman Suzy? Uh - chairwoman?” 

“Yes,” she says. “Motion passed. Or whatever. We can make lunch after.” 

“ _Yes,_ ” Arin says. “Dan - here - Suze, stand up, we’re gonna get some for real snuggle action going, I’m gonna plan this shit out,” and a couple of minutes later Suzy finds herself in the middle of a pile of skinny legs and big, strong arms and more hair than should belong to any three people - but she can’t find it in herself to complain. Arin starts heckling the contestants like he knows how to cook almost as soon as the show starts again, with Dan serving as his mild-mannered counterpart, his long fingers absently playing with Suzy’s hair. 

They’ll all three regret this later, spending their day doing this instead of catching up on work, or recording, or writing, or any of the other uncountable tasks they have. For now, she just wants to enjoy it.


End file.
